Foreword

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This document was prepared jointly by Technical Committee ISO/TC 37, Language and terminology, Subcommittee SC 2, Terminology workflow and language coding, and ISO/TC 46, Information and documentation, Subcommittee SC 4, Technical interoperability.

This second edition cancels and replaces ISO 639‑1:2002, ISO 639‑2:1998, ISO 639‑3:2007, ISO 639‑4:2010 and ISO 639‑5:2008, which have been merged and technically revised.

The main changes are as follows:

— the wording of the text (with provisions, such as principles, rules and guidelines) has been harmonized to apply to all sets of language identifiers of the ISO 639 language code;
— the ISO 639 language code subsets contained in the former ISO 639‑1, ISO 639‑2, ISO 639‑3 and ISO 639‑5 are now represented by sets of language identifiers: Set 1, Set 2, Set 3 and Set 5, respectively, and are not presented in this document;
— new developments in the field of coding systems have been taken into account;
— the title has been modified;
— the wordings in Clause 1 and Clauses 4 to 7 have been coordinated and harmonized;
— the Normative references have been updated;
— Clause 3 has been revised to harmonize the terminological entries for covering all sets of language identifiers, coordinated with ISO 21636‑1 and other pertinent standards;
— Clause 4 has been extended to cover additional guidelines;
— Clause 5 has been reformulated to harmonize previous texts;
— Clause 6 has been added;
— Clauses 7 and 8 have been revised to incorporate existing provisions, extending them to cover new requirements in the field of language coding;
— a new Annex A has been added to display the relationship between the sets of language identifiers and the language code elements of the ISO 639 language code;
— a new Annex B has been added to outline the role of the ISO 639 Maintenance Agency (ISO 639/MA) and its handling of Change Requests (CR).

Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A complete listing of these bodies can be found at www.iso.org/members.html.

BS ISO 639:2023

Code for individual languages and language groups

Current

Published:

30 Nov 2023