Language codes, country codes
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Languages
- ISO 639 is the set of international standards that lists short codes for language names:
- The Ethnologue codes correlate strongly with ISO 639-3. (Note that Ethnologue has a cross-reference of what languages are spoken in what countries, see [1])
- http://www.lingvoj.org (ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2)
- IETF language codes, according to RFC 4646 (and RFC 3066 before that)
- Language codes used in MARC (a library metadata standard) strongly correlate with ISO 639-2. (see [2])
Countries
- ISO 3166, most commonly ISO 3166-1:
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (two-letter codes, quite common, used in e.g. the country code top level domains (ccTLD) on the internet)
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 and...
- ISO 3166-1 numeric also see some use.
- UN M.49 are area codes used by the UN that defines geographical, political, and economic regions.
Writing systems
Currencies
ISO 4217 is a list of three letter currency codes consisting of the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code and the initial of the currency. It is the norm in banking, and also common in other contexts, such as airline and many other international tickets, exchange rates listed in newspapers, etc. (verify)
A few currencies are not listed, often because they are not independent currencies, usually because they are local currencies pinned to another currency. In some cases, these may have codes used for them which are not listed in the ISO document.
Notes
Note that there are some cases where the ISO 639-1 language code and the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code is the same.
Sometimes this may indicate the country that the language is mostly spoken in, sometimes they are completely unrelated.
This has led to some confusion, and people using codes in the wrong contexts.
This seems caused by most codes being based largely on exonyms and endonyms(verify)
