The final standard contains 7589 entries.3 The inventory of languages is based on a number of sources including: the individual languages contained in 639-2 modern languages from the Ethnologue 15th edition historic varieties ancient languages and artificial languages from Anthony Aristar at the Linguist List as well as languages recommended within a public commenting period.

A transition from ISO 639-1 could be done with List of ISO 639-1 codes. Contents 1 Code space 2 Macrolanguages 3 Collective languages 4 Usage of ISO 639-3 5 See also 6 References 7 External links 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 17576. Since ISO 639-2 defines special codes (4) a reserved range (520) and B-only codes (23) 547 codes cannot be used in part 3. Therefore a lower upper bound is 17576 547 17030.

The upper bound gets even lower if one subtracts the language collections defined in 639-2 and the ones yet to be defined in ISO 639-5. Macrolanguages Main article: ISO 639 macrolanguage

There are 56 languages in ISO 639-2 which are considered for the purposes of the standard to be "macrolanguages" in ISO 639-3.4 Some of these macrolanguages had no individual language as defined by ISO 639-3 in the code set of ISO 639-2 e.g. 'ara' (Generic Arabic). Others like 'nor' (Norwegian) had their two individual parts ('nno' (Nynorsk) 'nob' (Bokml)) already in ISO 639-2. That means some languages (e.g. 'arb' Standard Arabic) that were considered by ISO 639-2 to be dialects of one language ('ara') are now in ISO 639-3 in certain contexts considered to be individual languages themselves. This is an attempt to deal with varieties that may be linguistically distinct from each other but are treated by their speakers as two forms of the same language e.g. in cases of diglossia. For example: http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.aspidara (Generic Arabic 639-2) http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.aspidarb (Standard Arabic 639-3) See 5 for the complete list. Collective languages "A collective language code element is an identifier that represents a group of individual languages that are not deemed to be one language in any usage context."6 These codes do not precisely represent a particular language or macrolanguage. While ISO 639-2 includes three-letter identifiers for collective languages these codes are excluded from ISO 639-3. Hence ISO 639-3 is not a superset of ISO 639-2. ISO 639-5 defines 3-letter collective codes for language families and groups. See also: ISO 639-2#Collective languages and ISO 639-5 Usage of ISO 639-3 Lexical Markup Framework ISO specification for representation of machine-readable dictionaries Ethnologue Linguist List IETF language tag proposed as language TLD (lcTLD) 1 2 See also v d eISO 639 and ISO 639 macrolanguage     ISO 639-1 list of codes languages ISO 639-2 list of codes languages ISO 639-3 list of codes languages ISO 639-4 guidelines ISO 639-5 list of codes families/groups ISO 639-6 variants v d eISO standards Lists: List of ISO standards  List of ISO romanizations  List of IEC standards Categories: Category:ISO standards  Category:OSI protocols 1 to 9999 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  9  16  31 (-0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13)  128  216  217  226  228  233  259  269  302  306  428  639 (-1 -2 -3 -5 -6)  646  690  732  764  843  898  1000  1004  1007  1073-1  1413  1538  1745  2014  2015  2022  2108  2145  2146  2281  2709  2711  2788  3029  3103  3166 (-1 -2 -3)  3297  3307  3602  3864  3901  3977  4031  4157  4217  5218  5775  5776  5964  6166  6344  6346  6425  6429  6438  6523  6709  7001  7002  7098  7185  7498  7736  7810  7811  7812  7813  7816  8000  8217  8571  8583  8601  8632  8652  8691  8807  8820-5  8859 (-1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13 -14 -15 -16)  8879  9000  9075  9126  9241  9362  9407  9506  9529  9564  9594  9660  9897  9945  9984  9985  9995 10000 to 19999 10006  10118-3  10160  10161  10165  10179  10206  10303  10303-11  10303-21  10303-22  10303-238  10303-28  10383  10487  10585  10589  10646  10664  10746  10861  10957  10962  10967  11073  11170  11179  11404  11544  11783  11784  11785  11801  11898  11940  11941  11941 (TR)  11992  12006  12182:1998  12207  12234-2  13211 (-1 -2)  13216  13250  13399  13406-2  13407  13450  13485  13490  13567  13568  13584  13616  14000  14031  14396  14443  14496-10  14496-14  14644 (-1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9)  14649  14651  14698  14698-2  14750  14882  14971  15022  15189  15288  15291  15292  15408  15444  15445  15438  15504  15511  15686  15693  15706  15706-2  15707  15897  15919  15924  15926  15926 WIP  15930  16023  16262  16750  17024  17025  17369  17799  18000  18004  18014  18245  18629  18916  19005  19011  19092-1  19092-2  19114  19115  19125  19136  19439  19501:2005  19752  19757  19770  19775-1  19794-5 20000+ 20000  20022  21000  21047  21827:2002  22000  23270  23360  24613  24707  25178  26000  26300  26324  27000 series  27000  27001  27002  27003  27004  27005  27006  27007  27729  27799  29199-2  29500  31000  32000  38500  42010  80000 See also: All articles beginning with "ISO" References a b ISO 639-3 status and abstract (iso.org) Types of individual languages - Ancient languages (sil.org) ISO 639-3 Code Set Scope of denotation: Macrolanguages (sil.org) Macrolanguage Mappings (sil.org) Scope of denotation: Collective languages (sil.org) External links ISO 639-3 Registration Authority FAQ at the US Library of Congress website Linguist List - List of Ancient and Extinct Languages explanation by Hvard Hjulstad