Talk:ISO 639

message: What about dialects such as en-us? Are those part of this standard? -- AdamRaizen 14:15, 2003 Sep 8 (UTC)
:No, I believe thats just in the Internet RFCs (combination of the ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes).
::Yes, RFC 3066. But it's not only about country codes (ISO 3166). It can be anything that identifies a language/script variant (zh-HK-HanT = Chinese - Hongkong - Traditional Han ideographs; en-scouse) --84.188.156.201 19:03, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dialects 

message: :The Ethnologue, the ISO recognized authority for standard 639-3, is my first go-to reference for language codes, and usually the last one I need. Plugging "scy" into the Ethnologue language-by-code URL format to get
:: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=scy
: tells us
::Invalid language codescy is not a language code used in the Ethnologue, 16th edition, nor is it a valid ISO 639-3 code.
::* This is a code used in the Ethnologue 15th edition. See the archived 15th edition entry for scy.
: And that page says under "Comments":
:: The language has had no recognition since Sweden obtained Scania from Denmark in 1658. It is called 'Southern Swedish' in Sweden, and 'Eastern Danish' in Denmark. Today it is heavily influenced by Swedish in Sweden.
: ISO 639-6 assigns Scanian the 4-alpha code scyr, and under that "Scanian Spoken" scys. I've updated Scanian dialects#Status with the recent history (2009-2010) of that change. --Thnidu (talk) 17:12, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  ISO 639 sources 

message: I see "esk" is listed as a code for "Eskimo languages" (a better term I guess would be Yupik languages), apparently ever since the page has existed. For the same reasons given above for Scanian, I am wondering if this is a legitimate ISO 639 code. Let me know if you have a source for this code. --Iceager 10:47, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Ethnologue (the authority for ISO 639-3; see #ISO_639_sources) lists 10 Eskimo languages, including Northwest Alaska Inupiatun, which has the 639-3 code "esk" (probably based on the US Census listing it as “Eskimo”). The Eskimo group has two branches, Inuit and Yupik; Northwest Alaska Inupiatun is in the Inuit branch. --Thnidu (talk) 17:54, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eskimo languages 

message: I think that in the Alpha-3 code space paragraph should be mentioned that languages have the same ISO 639-2 and 639-3 (in case of 639-2 at lest the "form for TERMINOLOGICAL applications"). Am I assuming correctly? Could you please correct my assumptions?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.151.83.161 (talk) 23:06, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Not universally correct. See #ISO_639_sources. --Thnidu (talk) 17:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The same ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 code? 

message: I looked at the article and was unable to understand most of it.  IMO, the entire text needs to be rewritten so that it is accessible to people who don't already know what it's about. --Smack (talk) 21:42, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It also needs to be checked for accuracy. I just removed Banyumasan from the list, because it's not listed here , but there are probably other languages which should be removed too. (I also added Ainu, which is on the list of updates , but not the main alphabetical list yet, so please don't delete it.) --Chamdarae 00:32, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hey, at de.wikipedia.org they have these very nice pictures which I think would go some way to improving clarity, and shouldn't be hard to translate:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:ISO_639_Schematische_Darstellung.svg
and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:ISO_639_Mengenbeziehungen.svg -- note the delightful bilingual summary below.
Both images are creative commons attribution, both are Inkscape SVG so even with notepad, the desperate could edit them. Right now it's almost seven AM, I've been up all night and shouldn't be on addictive Wikipedia at all and my overheating monitor is flashing in my face making me nauseous ;) but yeah. Although I believe that content is far more useful than images in the long run, I think that converting these images would give a lot of bang for the buck. MIGHT have a crack at it later. Probably not but hey. 
Anyway correct me if I'm wrong on any of these counts -I'm known to be wrong often. 125.236.211.165 (talk) 17:49, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup needed 

message: I think List of ISO 639-3 codes should be renamed as List of ISO 639 alpha-3 codes or simply moved to List of ISO 639 codes. The same set of codes are not just used in ISO 639-3, but also ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-5.
: Many codes that were in Part 2 (i.e., 639-2) have been removed from Part 3.  See #ISO_639_sources.  --Thnidu (talk) 17:20, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: See Talk:lists of ISO 639 codes TalkChat (talk) 18:37, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of ISO 639 codes 

message: Hello. Could you create a template for Ladin which has an official status as minority language in the Province of Bolzano-Bozen and the Province of Trento, Italy. Please implement this template also at Commons, where it would be of much use, since many of the mountains in the Dolomites have actually Ladin names. Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 14:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template for Ladin needed 

message: If this was withdrawn, then what is the new standard? This needs clarification. It writes "it was withdrawn" and then it stops. It's natural to ask "then what is in place of it now?" Qorilla (talk) 21:04, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear 

message: Apologies for off-topic content, but does anyone know how to contact the maintainers of ISO 639? Have tried their website, but they list a postal address and a phone number, but no email address. Thanks, reply to my talk page please. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:55, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The different parts of 639 have different Registration Authorities. 639-3's is SIL, the maintainers of the Ethnologue; 639-6's is Geolang. --Thnidu (talk) 17:16, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Personal request 

message: The table in the middle of the article has a column called # that isn't explained at all, and further # numbers appear throughout the article. Can someone explain what those are? 84.75.8.21 (talk) 17:08, 12 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  What are the # numbers? 

message: The table near the beginning of the article indicates that ISO 639-3 has 7704 codes in it. However, I just downloaded the code table from the ISO 639-3 registrar, and it contains 7865 codes. Is the 7704 figure just old and needing to be corrected, or does it represent some subset of the complete set? AlbertBickford (talk) 21:36, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Dunno. If the figure of 7704 has no ref, then I say delete it. ISO does currently have 7865 codes. Ethnologue 18 has about 400 fewer; the difference is due to historical languages, conlangs, things that went extinct before ca. 1950, maybe some other stuff. — kwami (talk) 00:51, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Right, this number is supposed to be the number of code elements in the standard. But, I wanted to make sure that someone wasn't excluding macrolanguages or anything like that. (Still, if they did, that should have been documented.)  I'll make the change. AlbertBickford (talk) 00:57, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Other WPs (Kazakh, Korean) have the name number. Looks like the figure might be from 2007. — kwami (talk) 00:59, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be an increase of 161 codes in eight years, which strikes me as a little low, but it really doesn't matter. In my changes, I included the date, and updated Part 2 also, with references. The Part 1 number here is 184, and likewise the number listed in List_of_ISO_639-1_codes, but on the ISO 639-1 page it says only 136. So, I fixed that too, but I'd prefer to do so on the basis of an official list--I wasn't able to find one.  Do you know if the official list is available on the web, or only in ISO print publications? AlbertBickford (talk) 01:25, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: The official list is downloadable and can be imported easily into Excel.  The instructions are on one of the ISO 639-3 pages.  --Taivo (talk) 01:46, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

text:  That's the ISO 639-3 list, and that's how I got the 7865 number. I was wondering about the 2-letter codes in the ISO 693-1 list. I couldn't find any links from Wikipedia to any external source for those 184 (?) codes. Would it be safe to use the list from ISO 639-2 and just count the number of 639-1 codes it references? AlbertBickford (talk) 02:44, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  How many codes in ISO 639-3 Comment 

message: I'm wondering what criteria the ISO uses to sort languages into 639-1, 639-2, and 639-3 respectively. From what I've gathered, 639-1 consists of official languages and lingua francas, 639-3 is a comprehensive listing of almost all languages, while 639-2 is somewhere in the middle. However, it would be helpful to know what standards they use to determine whether a language is given a code in a certain category or not. Xcalibur (talk) 23:43, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The short answer is that it is a consequence of historical developments, which can only be partially explained by the nature of the languages involved. The 2-letter codes in 639-1 were based on major languages, and if I remember right, were the first to be adopted. 639-2 came later, as an outgrowth of library cataloguing standards. At the time it was proposed, equivalences between 639-1 and 639-2 were established (for languages that were included in both). Considerably later, 639-3 was proposed to greatly expand the number of languages covered by the standard, and to provide a system whereby the code set could be amended in an orderly way. ISO turned to Ethnologue, which had a set of 3-letter codes that provided the coverage they wanted, but there were some cases where Ethnologue's codes didn't match 639-2--and the desire was that the new 639-3 codes for individual languages would not negate or conflict with 639-2 codes. So, about 10% of the Ethnologue codes were changed, and the result became the first version of 639-3. Now that 639-3 is established, essentially all new codes for languages are added to 639-3, since if a language isn't already in 639-1 or 639-2, it wouldn't be big enough or have enough established literature to qualify for either of those two. So, in essence, 639-3 provides a way to expand the code set provided by 639-2 without negating the earlier standard (which, when we're talking about standards, is something that you generally don't want to do--it goes against the meaning of what it is to be a standard). I agree that it would be nice to spell this out in the article, but I chose to summarize things here because I'm doing this from memory and don't have citable sources at hand. So, I'd encourage anyone who does to make the change. AlbertBickford (talk) 02:01, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I see, thanks. So it was an organic growth process, rather than a cut-and-dry rule (eg, 639-1 is for languages with official status, 639-2 is for languages with some sort of distinction, 639-3 is for all languages). That makes it a little more complicated, but I still think the article should cover the system of classification, however logical it is or is not. Xcalibur (talk) 02:44, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, that's a good way to put it: an organic growth process rather than a cut-and-dry rule. Because of the history, the three standards embrace different types of languages--because of the types that were trying to be included at the time the standard was established. So, it seems like there should be a rationale for what's in each standard, and there was, sort of. But, there are lots of cases where such decisions could be questioned after the fact, but because they are standards, nobody is going to change them. AlbertBickford (talk) 04:06, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  methodology? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I just modified the terminology of the page based on the newly published ISO 639:2023, but didn't touch the existing usage of "code" because the change would be too tremendous. Unlike the popular usage of this word, "code" in ISO 639 has technically always stood for "collection of rules that maps the elements of a first set of values onto the elements of one or more different sets", not individual members of it. Should we stick with the current language? アヲガネ (talk) 05:54, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the article should continue to use the common word "code". DRMcCreedy (talk) 07:13, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry if I misunderstand your response, but my discussion is not about using the word "code" or not, but using "code" in the way ISO 639 standard does or not (most of the current occurrences of "code" corresponds to either code element or identifier in the standard's definition). アヲガネ (talk) 11:13, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Ahh... So you mean to update the article using ISO 639's definition in descriptions. That would probably be OK if they're sourced. But I'm not 100% sure what that would look like. DRMcCreedy (talk) 06:05, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  On the term "code" 

message: According to ISO_639-3, ISO_639-2b and ISO_639-2t, the 3-letter code for nynorsk is "nno", but the article says "non". Is there any reason for that? Or is it a typo? 130.238.112.129 (talk) 21:54, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  code for nynorsk may be wrong