ISO 639 macrolanguage

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ISO 639-3 defines some languages as macrolanguages. There are 56 languages in ISO 639-2 which the SIL considers to be “macrolanguages” in 639-3 [1].

Some of these macrolanguages had no individual language as defined by 639-3 in ISO 639-2, e.g. 'ara'. Others like 'nor' had their two individual parts (nno,nob) already in 639-2.

That means some languages (e.g. 'arb') that were considered by ISO 639-2 to be dialects of one language ('ara') are now in ISO 639-3 in certain contexts considered to be individual languages themselves.

This is an attempt to deal with varieties that may be linguistically distinct from each other, but are treated by their speakers as forms of the same language, e.g. in cases of diglossia.

For example,

• http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara (Generic Arabic, 639-2)
• http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=arb (Standard Arabic, 639-3)

[edit] List of macrolanguages

ISO 639 Abv.	Number of forms	Language name
aka	2	Akan languages
ara	30	Arabic language
aym	2	Aymara language
aze	2	Azerbaijani language
bal	3	Baluchi language
bik	5	Bikol language
bua	3	Buriat language
chm	2	Mari language (Russia)
cre	6	Cree language
del	2	Delaware language
den	2	Slave language (Athapascan)
din	5	Dinka language
doi	2	Dogri language (generic)
fas	2	Persian language
ful	9	Fulah language
gba	5	Gbaya language (Central African Republic)
gon	2	Gondi language
grb	5	Grebo language
grn	5	Guaraní language
hai	2	Haida language
hbs	3	Serbo-Croatian language
hmn	21	Hmong language
iku	2	Inuktitut language
ipk	2	Inupiaq language
jrb	5	Judeo-Arabic languages
kau	3	Kanuri language
kok	2	Konkani language (generic)
kom	2	Komi language
kon	3	Kongo language
kpe	2	Kpelle language
kur	3	Kurdish language
lah	8	Lahnda language
man	7	Mandingo language
mlg	10	Malagasy language
mon	2	Mongolian language
msa	13	Malay language (generic)
mwr	6	Marwari language
nor	2	Norwegian language
oci	5	Occitan language (post 1500); Provençal
oji	7	Ojibwa language
orm	4	Oromo language
pus	3	Pushto language
que	44	Quechua language
raj	6	Rajasthani language
rom	7	Romany language
sqi	4	Albanian language
srd	4	Sardinian language
swa	2	Swahili language (generic)
syr	2	Syriac language
tmh	4	Tamashek language
uzb	2	Uzbek language
yid	2	Yiddish language
zap	58	Zapotec language
zha	2	Zhuang language
zho	13	Chinese language

[edit] External links

• http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/macrolanguages.asp for the complete list.