International Language Codes

With the form on this page you can look up the International Language Codes (according to ISO 639) for all languages in the World.

The 2-letter Language Codes may for example be used in the your browsers language setup. For this use the Language Code is sometimes extended with a Country Code to specify a certain dialect. (e.g. en-US for American English).
The 3-letter Language Codes (MARC codes, ISO 639/2) covers a much larger number of languages than the 2-letter codes, including several dialects.

The names of the languages on this page are displayed in their English form.

Not all languages has a 2-letter Language Code (e.g. Acoli). Some of the languages has two 3-letter Language Codes (e.g. Albanian). Hence the form is provided with two fields for 3-letter Language Code.

In the field Freetext you can enter a part of the name of a language, whereafter Language Codes and Language Name will be found for all language names that contains the entered text. Every new click on the OK-button to the right of the freetext-field will jump to the next language that contains the entered string. For example a freetext-search on "ongo" will find the following languages:

Kongo
Mongo (Lolo, Bantu)
Mongolian
Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo)

2-letter Language Code:		Fill out the desired field and press the OK-button to the right of the field to have the other fields filled out.
3-letter Language Code 1:
2:
Language Name:
Freetext:	(Repeat click)

In browsers with slow JavaScript execution it may take a few seconds before Language Codes or Language Name is found. At freetext-search the JavaScript interpreter in some browsers can not distinguish between upper- and lowercase for some of the characters beside A-z (i.g. É and é).

Show List:

sorted after Language Name
sorted after 2-letter Language Code
sorted after 3-letter Language Code

based on Freetext-search

At slow JavaScript execution it may take quite some time before the list is displayed. Especially it may take a long time the first time sorted after Language Code is chosen. Some browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer) may suggest to abort the script - just answer No to this.

Last updated January 15th 2002.

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