ISO 639 [SEP] standards body
ISO 639
ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for languages and language groups.
It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as "ISO 639/R") and withdrawn in 2002. The ISO 639 set consists of five parts.
Use of ISO 639 codes.
The language codes defined in the several sections of ISO 639 are used for bibliographic purposes and, in computing and internet environments, as a
-2 (referred to as ISO 639-2/RA). As registration authority, the LOC receives and reviews proposed changes; they also have representation on the ISO 639-RA Joint Advisory Committee responsible for maintaining the ISO 639 code tables.
History and relationship to other ISO 639 standards.
Work was begun on the ISO 639-2 standard in 1989, because the ISO 639-1 standard, which uses only two-letter codes for languages, is not able to accommodate a sufficient number of languages. The