Whoa, we somehow hit 50,000 subscribers! Since we probably have a bunch of relatively new people helping out, I thought I'd write up a quick overview of the international language and country codes people might see around on our community to serve as an introduction and as a refresher.

Language Codes

Every post on r/translator is assigned a language code from the ISO 639 standard. For those unfamiliar with the ISO 639 standard, it is a universal standard concerned with representing languages in consistent alphanumeric codes and is broadly used by international organizations, businesses, and websites to represent languages. For example, go to any Wikipedia page for a language and you'll see its ISO 639 code(s) in the infobox at the top of the page.

We use two parts of the ISO 639 standard on r/translator: ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3.

Note: The ISO 639 standard is not perfect, but it's the best system that exists to unambiguously classify languages and is widely used. Some broader issues with the system include:

• Language codes cannot be changed after their creation and may either:

  • Reflect a designation that is incorrect (ase "American Signed English" is American Sign Language, but ASL is not English)

  • Encode a pejorative for the people in a linguistic group (Morey et. al cite clk “Idu” < "Chulikata" (pejorative))

• Reflect political divisions rather than purely linguistic ones. For example, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are all mutually intelligible but are defined separately in ISO 639-1, but all the Chinese and Arabic varieties (most of which are not mutually intelligible) are lumped under zh and ar respectively.

ISO 639-1 (two-letter language codes)

ISO 639-1 codes consist of two letters and are intended to cover the world's most-spoken languages. The vast majority of the requests on this subreddit are for the 184 languages that have an ISO 639-1 code, for example:

• ja - Japanese

• de - German

• ru - Russian

Please note that despite some similarities, these language codes are not necessarily identical to their country code counterparts, which were defined separately several decades ago. Examples below:

ISO 639-3 (three-letter language codes)

ISO 639-3 codes consist of three letters and are intended to cover all human languages, modern and ancient. There are almost 8,000 languages covered by this standard, so obviously most languages in this standard do not have an equivalent two-letter ISO 639-1 code. We tend to get fewer requests for languages that only have an ISO 639-3 code, but here are some of the more frequent examples seen here:

• yue - Cantonese

• grc - Ancient Greek

• lzh - Classical Chinese

• gsw - Swiss German

Please note that the ISO 639-3 standard also includes some utility codes which don't necessarily reference a specific language, including art for artificial (constructed) languages, and zxx for something that isn't a language at all.

Script Codes

ISO 15924 (four-letter script codes)

ISO 15924 codes consist of four letters and are intended to cover writing systems, as distinct from the languages they represent. We don't use them too much in r/translator - they're used to classify "Unknown" posts for which we don't know the language yet, but we know the writing system.

To give an example, the Sanskrit (sa) mantra auṃ maṇi padme hūṃ may be represented with the following scripts:

The underlying language is still Sanskrit; it's just written with different writing systems.

Script codes as mentioned above, are largely redundant for non-"Unknown" posts on r/translator. For example, there isn't any benefit to defining a Finnish post as fi-Latn (Finnish in the Latin script) since Finnish has always been written in the Latin script.