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ISO 639 is one of several international standards that list short codes for language names. ISO 639 consists of different parts, of which two parts have been approved and a third part that is in the final approval (FDIS) stage. The other parts are works in progress.
Alpha-3 code space Since the code is three letter alphabetic one upper bound for the number of languages and language collections that can be represented is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17 576. Part 2 defines four special codes mul, und, mis, zxx, a reserved range qaa-qtz (20 × 26 = 520 codes) and has 23 double entries (the B/T codes). This sums up to 520+23+4 = 547 codes that cannot be used in part 3 to represent languages or in part 5 to represent language families or groups.The remainder is 17 576 – 547 = 17 029. A further tighter upper bound can be calculated by subtracting the numbers of language collections from ISO 639-2. See also | ||||||||
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