ISO 639 Macrolanguage

ISO 639 Macrolanguage

ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. In defining some of its language codes, some are defined as macrolanguages covering either borderline cases between strongly divergent dialects and very closely related languages (dialect continuums), or speech varieties that are considered to be either the same or different languages for ethnic or political rather than linguistic reasons. There are fifty-six languages in ISO 639-2 that are considered to be macrolanguages in ISO 639-3. The use of this category of macrolanguage has been applied in the Ethnologue 16th edition.

Some of the macrolanguages had no individual language as defined by 639-3 in ISO 639-2, e.g. 'ara' (Arabic). Others like 'nor' (Norwegian) had their two individual parts (nno Nynorsk, nob Bokmål) already in 639-2. That means some languages (e.g. 'arb' Standard Arabic) 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,

• Generic Arabic, 639-2
• Standard Arabic, 639-3