ISO 639-3

This is the home page for Part 3 of the ISO 639 family of standards, Codes for the representation of names of languages. ISO 639-3 attempts to provide as complete an enumeration of languages as possible, including living, extinct, ancient, and constructed languages, whether major or minor, written or unwritten.

Announcement: the 2009 series change request outcomes announced

In the 2009 series of change requests 89 requests have been considered, recommending 137 explicit changes in the code set. Twelve of the requests are still pending. Of the 77 requests that have been decided, eight have been rejected, five have been partially adopted, and 64 have been fully approved. New tab-delimited files are available on the Download page. The outcomes of the remaining 8 will be announced and incorporated into the code set in the coming weeks. A list of the change requests still pending may be viewed in the Change request index (new 2010 series requests will also begin appearing on that page).

The approved changes (as of 2010-01-20) can be analyzed as follows:

• Retirements: 18
• 8 merged languages;
• 9 split languages, resulting in 20 new language code elements (net gain of 11).
• 1 retirement of a code element representing a language sub-family whose constituents were already present in code set.
• Completely new language identifiers: 14 newly created code elements for languages not previously associated with another language in the standard.
• Updates: 47
  • 37 name updates, either change to a name form or addition of a name form;
  • 7 denotation updates of languages into which other varieties were merged;
  • 1 macrolanguage group update;
  • 2 new macrolanguage groups (existing individual language changed in scope to macrolanguage).

A report of the 2009 series of changes is available. Remaining changes will be summarized in an addendum. All past change requests are retained permanently on this website. A past change request may be found through its change request number, as in http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/chg_detail.asp?id=2006-001 or through the documentation page of an affected code element, as in http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=bvs. See also information about code set management and the change process.

Change requests for 2010 are now being accepted.

ISO 639-3 is a code that aims to define three-letter identifiers for all known human languages. At the core of ISO 639-3 are the individual languages already accounted for in ISO 639-2. The large number of living languages in the initial inventory of ISO 639-3 beyond those already included in ISO 639-2 was derived primarily from Ethnologue (15th edition). Additional extinct, ancient, historic, and constructed languages have been obtained from Linguist List.

SIL International has been designated as the ISO 639-3/RA for the purpose of processing requests for alpha-3 language codes comprising the International Standard, Codes for the representation of names of languages - Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages. The ISO 639-3/RA receives and reviews applications for requesting new language codes and for the change of existing ones according to criteria indicated in the standard. It maintains an accurate list of information associated with registered language codes which can be viewed on or downloaded from this website, and processes updates of registered language codes. Notification of pending and adopted updates are also distributed on a regular basis to subscribers and other parties.

This is the official site of the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority and thus is the only one authorized by ISO. If you have questions concerning ISO 639-3 please contact us at:

SIL International
ISO 639-3 Registrar
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd.
Dallas, TX 75236

E-mail:
Phone: +1 972 708 7400, ext. 2293
FAX: +1 972 708 7546