Analysis of ISO 639 and mappings to SIL Ethnologue

Date:      Wed, 13 Feb 2002 16:58:53 -0600
From:      Peter_Constable@sil.org
To:        unicode@unicode.org, unicore@unicode.org, ietf-languages@eikenes.alvestrand.no, iso639@dkuug.dk, langtag@unicode.org, www-international@w3.org, locales@yahoogroups.com, i18n-prog@yahoogroups.com
Subject:   Analysis of ISO 639 and mappings to SIL Ethnologue

In connection to work that Gary Simons and I have been doing in interaction with ISO/TC 37/SC 2/WG 1, we have added some new pages to the Ethnologue web site that present an analysis we have done of the existing ISO 639 language codes together with a proposed mapping of those codes to entries in the SIL Ethnologue. Here are some relevant URLs:

http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/ -- entry point and intro (the following pages can be reached via links from this page)
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/codes.asp -- a table of current ISO 639 codes, with links for each code to a report showing our proposed mapping to Ethnologue entries
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/analysis.asp -- our analysis of ISO 639 codes
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/An_analysis_of_ISO_639.pdf -- a paper describing the principles by which we derived our proposed mapping and some issues that arise from the analysis (this is the paper I presented at IUC 20)
http://www.ethnologue.com/codes/ -- information on the codes used in the Ethnologue, with links to downloadable files containing core language data from the Ethnologue

From the first page mentioned above, you will find links to downlodable files containing the mapping data.

It should be noted that our analysis and proposed mapping have not been approved by ISO, though they are being given consideration. Some of the principles we adopted in deciding on mappings may turn out to be different from what ISO would want to adopt. We adopted those principles based on our understanding of what would best suit the interests of TC 37 (though not necessarily TC 46 -- due mainly to the circumstance of which committee we happened to be interacting with), and viewed them as a proposal for ISO to consider and revise as might be needed.

- Peter

Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See: "Language Identifiers in the Markup Context."

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