Standards for Language Codes: developing ISO 639
David Dalby, Lee Gillam, Christopher Cox, Debbie Garside · 2004
The international community, including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is currently seeking more granular systems of language identifiers than the widely used tags of ISO 639 parts 1 and 2. There is growing need for the more precise identification and annotation of language-based resources.This paper presents a key response to this need, in which the Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities would provide the referential framework for a future part 6 of ISO 639.The paper discusses the proposed evolution of ISO 639-6 and its relationship to other parts of ISO 639, including its relevance to the definition of meta-data categories in ISO 12620.