From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Jul 14 2005 - 09:34:15 CDT
Donald Z. Osborn <dzo at bisharat dot net> wrote:
> I was surprised to find that some 2-letter ISO-639-1 language codes I
thought
> were official are not in the list of codes. Specifically:
>
> bm - Bambara
> ff - Fula (Fulfulde/Pulaar)
> ig - Igbo
All of these are valid ISO 639-1 code elements.
The official code lists are at
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langhome.html. Try to go to the
source if at all possible. There are many unofficial lists floating
around on the Internet, but many are out of date or otherwise incorrect.
> The first two I recall communicating with Indrek Hein about in 2000,
> and assumed they were already adopted. The one for Igbo I found on in
> a Wikipedia article.
>
> The next questions are what their status is if any (other than
> imaginary, I guess), and whether it is worth putting those and
> possibly others forth for approval. Or is ISO-639-1 now closed?
ISO 639-1 is not completely closed, but only a language newly added to
ISO 639-2 can receive an ISO 639-1 code. In other words, no language
that currently has a 3-letter code but no 2-letter code will get one,
and no newly added language will get a 2-letter code unless it also gets
a 3-letter code.
> I'm aware of course of ISO-639-2 (3-letter codes) and ISO/DIS-639-3.
> Am I correct in assuming that ISO-639-2 is intended to replace
> ISO-639-1? Also, what is the intended relationship between ISO-639-2
> and ISO/DIS-639-3 (once the latter is adopted)?
Each of these parts has a different scope. In particular, with the
widespread use of ISO 639-1 (as ccTLDs, for example) there is no chance
that ISO 639-2 will ever "replace" it. The parts complement each other.
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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