The language codes of ISO 639:
A premature, ultimately unobtainable, and possibly damaging
standardization
Stephen Morey*, Mark W. Post+ and Victor A. Friedman#
La Trobe University*, University of New England+ and University of Chicago#

1. ISO 639: What is it?
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ambitious attempt to catalogue and standardize various types of references to thelanguages of the world
aims to facilitate precise reference to languages, language groups, and language
varieties, aiding in cataloguing, archiving, and machine processing (among otherpotential uses)
designed to succeed where ordinary language has failedo “Adi” and “Abor” ref. to same language (adi)o “Ama” and “Ama” ref. to different languages (nyi and amm)
developed by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Geneva, CHo provides “requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics thatcan be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes
and services are fit for their purpose” (International Organization forStandardization 2013)
consists of six parts (Table 1):

StandardName (Codes for the representation of namesof languages)

ISO 639-1

Part 1: Alpha-2 code

ISO 639-2

Part 2: Alpha-3 code
Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive
coverage of languages
Part 4: Implementation guidelines and generalprinciples for language coding
Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families andgroups
Part 6: Alpha-4 representation forcomprehensive coverage of language variants

ISO 639-3
ISO 639-4
ISO 639-5
ISO 639-6

First edition Current
1967 (as ISO2002639)
1998
1998

No. in list
184>4507704 + local
range

2007

2007

2010-07-16

2010-07-16(not a list)

2008-05-15

2008-05-15

114

2009-11-17

2009-11-17?

Table 1 – The six parts of the ISO 639 regime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639, accessed on19/07/2013), parts in bold underline have already been approved by ISO•

each part has a different “registration authority”: International Information Centrefor Terminology (Infoterm; ISO 639-1), Library of Congress (ISO 629-2), SILInternational (ISO 639-3)

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2. SIL International 1 and the administration of ISO 639-3•SIL’s Ethnologue forms basis for ISO 639-3•“three-letter codes” (= “language identifiers”), one for every “language” everspoken•

three-letter codes in principle arbitrary, but in fact mostly mnemonic (=meaningful)o ex: rus = Russian, spa = Spanish, jpn = Japaneseo ex: czh = Huizhou Chinese, cjy = Jinyu Chinese, cdo = Min Dong (c =Chinese (in English)o ex: nyi = Ama (reflects alternate name Nyima(ng)o ex: clk = Idu (reflects pejorative exonym Chulikata)•submissions, change requests and decisions administered by SIL Internationalo creation of a new code “languages not previously associated with another language in thecode set” (Spanne 2010)• e.g. jkr “Aka Koro”, following Anderson and Murmu(2010)o retirement of an existing code usually when two codes exist for “the same” language, and one isdiscarded• e.g. drh “Darkhat” merged with khk “Halh Mongolian”, drh
discarded
o update of an existing code
 code is re-defined as referencing a language it previously did not,or other facts about the denotatum change

What is not possible is:code is changed, while code-denotatum relationship remains
unchanged• e.g. adl (to which the Galo community of Arunachal
Pradesh, North East India, objected, could not be changed
to something preferable or arbitrary, such as glx or zzq)

“Since 1989 not one single ISO 639 language identifier has been changed (once they have beenassigned). This is a very strong principle, which has been strengthened during the lifetime of the ISO
639 series…Actual changes to the language identifiers can only be done if the scope of the encoded
item itself has changed (e.g. if what was seen as one language previously were now to be seen as twoor more separate languages).” (Håvard Hjulstad. Secretary of the ISO 639 JAC, email communication
to Mark W. Post, 20/10/2009)1

SIL International is the new name for the erstwhile Summer Institute of Linguistics.

23. What are the problems?
1. Use of three-letter alphabetic codes is problematica. in principle arbitrary, in fact mnemonic (eng = English, etc.)
b. many based on pejorative labels, which “permanently” enshrines offensive
designations for (usually minority) speech communities
i. clk “Idu” < Chulikata (pejorative)
ii. jnj “Yemsa” < Janejero (pejorative)iii. dap “Nyishi” < Dafla (pejorative) 2
2. Administration of ISO 639-3 by SIL International is problematica. not a disinterested scholarly organization, but in fact a Christian
missionary organization whose main aim is translation of the Christian
Bible (Dobrin and Good 2009; Olson 2009)b. design of Ethnologue and related administration of ISO 639-3
i. lacks transparency and accountability
ii. seemingly privileges closed internal resources over open, peerreviewed scholarly resources• e.g., section on Tani languages continues to ignore Sun(1993), resulting in many incorrect classifications of welldocumented languages• new section on Aka Koro based on internal unpublishedreports rather than on Anderson and Murmu (2010), despitethat the latter attracted worldwide press coverageiii. does not cite sources, in generaliv. does not regularly and proactively seek outside expert commentaryc. right or wrong, many linguists eschew cooperation with SIL due to its
sectarian focus and uneven academic credentials and practices
3. The concept of “permanence” is fundamentally incompatible with the nature ofhuman language
a. languages are not static entities, but are in fact dynamic processes
b. languages change over time. Chaucer’s English is mostly unintelligible tomodern English speakers. Should it receive a distinct ISO 639-3 code? Ifso, where is the cut-off date?
c. all languages which are currently referenced by ISO 639-3 will change, tothe extent that they are eventually unrecognizable. The “permanent”
designator is thus certain to – eventually - fail to fulfill its purpose.

2

Between 30/06/13 and 28/11/13 dap was changed to njz, so perhaps this rule has changed?

33-letter code

Denotatum
at time A
Mutuallyintelligible
Denotatumat time B

Mutually
unintelligible

Mutuallyintelligible
Denotatum
at time C
4. The concept of “language” employed by ISO 639 is similar to the concept of“mineral” (static, discrete), and dissimilar to the concept of “biological species”(variable, evolving). But in fact, human language is more like the latter than theformer.
a. there is no commonly-agreed-upon and reliable means of determining thedifference between “two languages” and “two varieties of the samelanguage”, and dialect chains are common throughout the world. What
method will ISO 639 have for drawing boundaries in such cases?
i. ex. Taupota chain: Ross (1988: 8) has five lgs. while Ethnologue
has nine 3 (Easton 2007: 54-55)
b. socio-political concerns regularly enter into the determination of“languagehood” - whose “version” will ISO 639 privilege?
i. ex. Balkan region: territory from northeastern Italy and southern
Austria through former Yugoslavia to northern and eastern
Albania, northern Greece, and Bulgaria constitutes a dialect chain
in terms of South Slavic (Friedman 1999); speakers call theirlanguage “Bosnian”, “Croatian”, or “Serbian” on the basis of“ethnicity”: for Bosnian, Islam, for Croatians, Roman Catholicism,and Eastern Orthodox Christians either Serbian or Montenegrin,
depending on “national feeling”. An international body that claims
final authority in the classification of languages must inevitably
support one socio-political agenda over another.
c. concept of “macro-language” recently introduced by Ethnologue andimported into ISO 639 hardly represents a distinct scholarly consensus
5. Some aspects of ISO 639 are at a minimum premature given the present state-ofthe-art in linguistics, and may be in principle unattainable
a. ISO 639-5 aims to catalogue genetic relationships among the world’slanguages, while…
3

These are the Taupota group within Western Oceanic section of Austronesian. Their codes are grw, hqw,mum, mvn, tpa, tbo, wag, wed and ykk.

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i. many languages remain to be described in many parts of the world– so how can they currently be grouped into “families”? (Blenchand Post MS-2012)
ii. scholars continue to disagree on fundamental issues regardingclassification in some areas/language groups• e.g. for “Sino-Tibetan ~ Tibeto-Burman ~ TransHimalayan”, c.f. Matisoff (2003), van Driem (2013),
Blench and Post (2013)
iii. methods for genetically grouping languages seem to currently beevolving• phylogenetic frameworks
iv. studies in language contact and creolization continue to pose
problems for the concept of “genetic linguistics” (Burling 2007;McWhorter 2007)
6. ISO 639 has the potential to be misunderstood, misused and abused bygovernments and other decision-making bodies
a. existence or non-existence of ISO codes might support decisions toallocate/deny resources or grant/withdraw recognitioni. cf. Indian Government’s current requirement of “indigenousscript” (Burling 2011)
7. With its veneer of authority, ISO 639 has the potential to mislead scholars, sincedecisions regarding linguistic statuses and affiliations may be ceded tobureaucrats rather than experts.
4. What is to be done?
At a minimum:•••

Administration of ISO 639-3 should be re-assigned to an organization withrecognizable scholarly credentials and a proactive commitment to current
scholarship, which operates transparently and in partnership with the international
community of scholars.
Labels should be random combinations of letters and numerals, and notmnemonic/meaningful.
ISO 639-5 and ISO 639-6 must be delayed if not abandoned. There is nothing
approaching consensus in these areas.

Ideally:•The concept of “permanence” should be re-conceptualized. The simple but
unworkable concept SYMBOL-DENOTATUM should be re-worked as(something like) a “permanent paper trail”. Since we are not computer people, no;
we don’t know how to do this. But since the current SYMBOL-DENOTATUM

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regime is manifestly incompatible with many aspects of the nature of language, it
must be transformed somehow.
But ultimately:•Are these standardization regimes truly necessary? Useful? Productive?
Appropriate? Given that human language is not static or unchanging – neither in
itself nor in terms of scholars’ views about it – is this any more useful orappropriate than developing ISO codes for human religions? Ethnic identities?
Cultural practices? Sexualities? Emotions? (for example, to conduct search
queries across different literary genres?)

References
Anderson, Gregory D. S. and Ganesh Murmu (2010). 'Preliminary notes on Koro, a "hidden" language ofArunachal Pradesh.' Journal of Indian Linguistics 71: 1-32.
Blench, Roger and Mark W. Post (2013). 'Re-thinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from the perspective ofNorth East Indian languages.' In Nathan Hill and Tom Owen-Smith, Eds. Trans-Himalayan
Linguistics. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter: 71-104.
--- (MS-2012). Declassifying Arunachali languages: Reconsidering the evidence. Cambridge, UK andArmidale, AU, Kay Williamson Educational Foundation and University of New England.
Burling, Robbins (2007). 'The lingua franca cycle: Implications for language shift, language change, andlanguage classification.' Anthropological Linguistics 49 (3-4): 207-236.
--- (2011). 'Three meanings of “language” and “dialect” in North East India ' In Gwendolyn Hyslop,
Stephen Morey and Mark W. Post, Eds. North East Indian Linguistics Volume 3. New Delhi,Cambridge University Press India: 35-45.
Dobrin, Lisa M. and Jeff Good (2009). 'Practical language development: Whose mission?' Language 15(3): 619-629.
Easton, Catherine (2007). Discourses of Orthography Development: Community-Based Practice in Milne
Bay (P.N.G.). . PhD dissertation. Department of Linguistics. Melbourne, La Trobe University.
Friedman, Victor (1999). 'Macedonian Language and Identity: Recent History and Recent Historiography.'
In Kramer, Christina and Brian Cook, Eds. Guard the Word Well Bound: Proceedings of the Third
North American-Macedonian Conference on Macedonian Studies, [Indiana Slavic Studies 10].
Bloomington, IN: Slavica: 71-86.
International Organization for Standardization. (2013). "Standards." Retrieved 19-Jul, 2013, fromhttp://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm.
Matisoff, James A. (2003). Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-TibetanReconstruction. Berkeley, University of California Press.
McWhorter, John (2007). Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language
Grammars. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Olson, Kenneth (2009). 'SIL International: An emic view.' Language 85 (3): 646-652.
Ross, Malcolm (1988). Proto-Oceanic and the Austronesian Languages of Western Melanesia. Canberra,
Pacific Linguistics.
Sun, Tian-Shin Jackson (1993). A Historical-Comparative Study of the Tani (Mirish) Branch of TibetoBurman PhD Dissertation. Department of Linguistics. Berkeley, University of California.
van Driem, George (2013). 'Trans-Himalayan.' In Nathan Hill and Tom Owen-Smith, Eds. TransHimalayan Linguistics. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

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