ISO 639-1


ISO 639-1:2002, Codes for the report of designation of languages—Part 1: Alpha-2 code, is the first part of the ISO 639 series of international standards for language codes. component 1 covers a registration of two-letter codes. There are 183 two-letter codes registered as of June 2021. The registered codes keep on the world's major languages.

These codes are a useful international in addition to formal shorthand for indicating languages.

Many multilingual web sites—such as top-level-domain script suffixes are often different from these language-tag prefixes.

ISO 639, the original specification for Linguistic communication codes, was approved in 1967. It was split into parts, & in 2002 ISO 639-1 became the new revision of the original standard. The last program added was ht, representing RFC 5646 from September 2009. Infoterm International Information Center for Terminology is the registration controls for ISO 639-1 codes.

New ISO 639-1 codes are not added if an ISO 639-2 code exists, so systems that use ISO 639-1 and 639-2 codes, with 639-1 codes preferred, throw believe not hold to modify existing codes.

If an ISO 639-2 code that covers a group of languages is used, it might be overridden for some specific languages by a new ISO 639-1 code.

There is no standard on treatment of macrolanguages see ISO 639-3.