| Iso 639-3 |
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The draft from 15th edition, and by historic varieties, ancient languages and Artificial Languages from the Linguist List . The status of this project from January 2005 is that of Draft International Standard (DIS). The current draft is referred to as ISO/DIS 639-3. Code space Since the code is three-letter alphabetic, one upper bound for the number of languages that can be represented is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17 576. Since ISO 639-2 defines special codes (2), a reserved range (520) and B-only codes (23), 545 codes cannot be used in part 3. Therefore a tighter upper bound is 17 576 - 545 = 17 032. Macrolanguages There are 56 languages in ISO 639-2, for which SIL considers them as “macrolanguages”. That means some languages that were previously considered as dialects are now considered as individual languages by SIL. For example,
See http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/macrolanguages.asp for the complete list. Collective languages Some ISO 639-2 codes that are commonly used for languages do not precisely represent a particular language or some related languages (as the above macrolanguages). They are regarded as collective languages (or collectives) and are excluded from ISO 639-3. The 11 collective languages and their ISO 639-2 codes are:
For definition of macrolanguages and collective languages see http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/scope.asp See also External links
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