Talk:ISO 639-1

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Text and/or other creative content from this version of List of ISO 639-1 codes was copied or moved into ISO 639-1 with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Change references to RFC 3066 to BCP 47[edit]

Hello, in the line:

 "See note in RFC 3066 section 2.3 Choice of language tag:"

the reference here to RFC 3066 should probably be changed to reference BCP 47

BCP 47 Obsoletes RFC 3066.

Jtotoro 21:08, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The quote is not in the current BCP 47 (= RFC 4646 + RFC 4647), so we have to quote RFC 3066. (But the quote is from ISO, and quoting it via an RFC looks a bit strange - it would be best if we could find the original ISO document and quote it directly.) --Zundark 21:51, 12 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

On closer inspection, I see that RFC 4646 does have a similar quote from ISO, and gives its source. So I've changed the article to refer directly to this source (ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee: Working principles for ISO 639 maintenance, on the ISO 639-2/RA website). --Zundark 09:17, 13 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just out of curiosity...[edit]

Is there any known figure regarding the percentage of world languages that have been designated with an ISO 639-1 code? ~ Skyscraper (talk) 18:26, 9 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Broken Link in Reference[edit]

I removed the following reference as the link is broken. (Source: Main page content)

<ref>"Search engine for official language codes".</ref>

What is the "find a language" tool thing meant to do?[edit]

It either doesn't work or isn't useful. You type a two letter code and it just searches Wikipedia for it, virtually always landing on a disambiguation page? Why is this a useful thing? Stevage 04:57, 6 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't even work anymore, what's up? Cheers, Horst-schlaemma (talk) 22:29, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Examples[edit]

The example code section of this article is really bloated. A full 15% of all codes are listed as examples. I'm sure many people want a specific language listed but I think it could do with some trimming. Of the 28 codes listed:

Twelve are the first two letter of the English language name (ar, da, en, fi, fr, it, ja, ko, ku, ro, ru, and ur)
Five are letters (other than the first two) found in the English language name (eo, pl, pt, tl, and tr)
Five are the first two letters of the endonym of the language name (zh, ka, de, el, and fa)
Five are letters (other than the first two) from the endonym (hy, cs, nl, es, and sv)
One is based on an undisclosed method that isn't the current English name or the endonym

I think one example from each of these groups should suffice to demonstrate how codes work. My question is: How should the examples be chosen in a non-partisan way? Based on the number of speakers for the existing groups we would have five examples: en, pt, zh, es, and (presumably) ms. Is that reasonable? DRMcCreedy (talk) 01:18, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

+1. Except that both of the letters ms are found in the French and German language names malais and Malaiisch. ISO 639-1 was published in three languages, not only in English. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 01:48, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How about a list of half a dozen example codes showing their official English, French, and German ISO 639-1 language names as well as (romanized) endonyms. We could highlight identical letters using bold typeface. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 02:09, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

+1. I feel better about ms being in there now. Are en, pt, zh, es, and ms acceptable? DRMcCreedy (talk) 02:21, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, why not? (But note that es is also the beginning of French espagnol, not only of Spanish español.) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 02:27, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. I'll do it in a few days to give others a chance to join the discussion. DRMcCreedy (talk) 03:18, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I support paring down the list of examples. It's maybe worth noting that quite a few codes fall into more than one category. For instance, lots of languages' words for Portuguese start with the letter or sound p and contain the letter or sound t (see the Translations sections of wikt:Portuguese). — Eru·tuon 06:39, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the list is way too long and should be pared down. Even just three examples (like it used to be) would be fine. The only reason it's so long is that people keep adding their own favourite language to the list (which means it will grow again after being pared down, unless someone is prepared to police it). To my mind, one purpose of the list is to make it clear to readers that these language codes are something they are (probably) already familiar with, and for that reason the examples chosen should be ones that are indeed likely to be familiar to the reader. (In particular, en should be the first example - if they are reading the English Wikipedia, they should at least be familiar with that one, not least of all because it's used in the domain name). --Zundark (talk) 09:02, 2 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've made the update. In the end I left off ms because it didn't add anything beyond pt, which has more speakers. Now it's just a matter of fending off additions that duplicate the demonstrated patterns. DRMcCreedy (talk) 17:51, 4 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

مقصد انسانیت[edit]

ہیومن رائٹس Karimsardarfarooq (talk) 07:51, 8 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Changing the examples[edit]

The "Many multilingual web sites—such as Wikipedia—use these codes to prefix URLs of specific language versions of their web sites: for example, en.Wikipedia.org is the English version of Wikipedia. See also IETF language tag. (Two-letter country-specific top-level-domain code suffixes are often different from these language-tag prefixes)." section, in my opinion, could deserve some changes to the example. Wikipedia, the namespace site, and English, the most common language, are a little too boring. Can we use a different site and language? I will remove some information temporarily on the main page until we can work out a manageable website. 2601:C6:D281:6710:EC72:5909:D51F:6B5C (talk) 22:55, 2 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]