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 2010 series review cycle for change requests will be delayed.

The Candidate Review Period for the 2010 series of change requests for ISO 639-3 will be delayed for a minimum of two months. Normally the closing date for new change requests would be September 1, and the formal review period would be September 15 to December 15. We currently anticipate that the review process will instead begin in November. While new change requests may be sent to in the interim, response from this address may be delayed substantially. We apologize for this delay and will post an update as soon as possible on this site.

2009 series of change requests completed.

A full report of the 2009 series of changes is now available. This report includes an addendum announcing the outcomes of seven additional change requests that had not been decided by the time the initial summary report was produced. As of July 1, 84 requests in the 2009 series have been decided. All past change requests are retained permanently on this website. The change requests of the 2009 series that have been decided are listed at http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/chg_requests.asp?order=CR_Number&chg_status=2009. 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. This page includes links to summary reports for all past series of change requests.

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