About the data

Data is taken from the Library of Congress as the ISO 639-2 Registration Authority.

data/language-codes.csv

This file contains the 184 languages with ISO 639-1 (alpha 2 / two letter) codes and their English names.

Field Information

Field Name Order Type (Format) Description alpha2 1 string 2 letter alpha-2 code English 2 string English name of language

data/language-codes-3b2.csv

This file contains the 184 languages with both ISO 639-2 (alpha 3 / three letter) bibliographic codes and ISO 639-1 codes, and their English names.

Field Information

Field Name Order Type (Format) Description alpha3-b 1 string 3 letter alpha-3 bibliographic code alpha2 2 string 2 letter alpha-2 code English 3 string English name of language

data/language-codes-full.csv

This file is more exhaustive. It contains all languages with ISO 639-2 (alpha 3 / three letter) codes, the respective ISO 639-1 codes (if present), as well as the English and French name of each language. There are two versions of the three letter codes: bibliographic and terminologic. Each language has a bibliographic code but only a few languages have terminologic codes. Terminologic codes are chosen to be similar to the corresponding ISO 639-1 two letter codes.

Example from Wikipedia:

[…] the German language (Part 1: de) has two codes in Part 2: ger (T code) and deu (B code), whereas there is only one code in Part 2, eng, for the English language.

There are four special codes: mul, und, mis, zxx; and a reserved range qaa-qtz.

Field Information

Field Name Order Type (Format) Description alpha3-b 1 string 3 letter alpha-3 bibliographic code alpha3-t 2 string 3 letter alpha-3 terminologic code (when given) alpha2 3 string 2 letter alpha-2 code (when given) English 4 string English name of language French 5 string French name of language

License

This material is licensed by its maintainers under the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL).

Nevertheless, it should be noted that this material is ultimately sourced from the Library of Congress as a Registration Authority for ISO and their licensing policies are somewhat unclear. As this is a short, simple database of facts, there is a strong argument that no rights can subsist in this collection.

However, if you intended to use these data in a public or commercial product, please check the original sources for any specific restrictions.

Keywords

• language codes
• ISO Language Codes
• ISO 639-1
• ISO 693-2