ISO 639-5:2008 pdf free.Codes for the representation of names of languages一 Part 5: Alpha-3 code for language families and groups.
4 Application issues
4.1 Alpha-3 language coding code space
The totality of language identifiers encoded in all parts of ISO 639 constitutes one common code space. Each language identifier is uniquely defined and has one intension only. (See 4.2 for a special case.)
4.2 Language identifiers that are also included in ISO 639-2
ISO 639-2 contains a number of language identifiers that denote language families (3.5) or language groups (3.6). Some of these identifiers denote the entire family or group, while other identifiers are intended to denote any language (or a text or document in a language) within a language family or language group that does not have a specific language identifier as an individual language in ISO 639-2. These items are referred to as remainder groups (3.7).
Items that are remainder groups in ISO 639-2 have been renamed in this part of ISO 639 to conform to the naming convention of other families and groups, normally by changing “(other)” to “languages” in English, and by deleting the word “autres” in French. These items are identified with the letter “r” in the “639-2” column of the tables. See Annex A for a separate list of these items as included in ISO 639-2.
There are currently 55 items that are included in both ISO 639-2 and this part of ISO 639. Of these items, 20 items are identical in the two parts (e.g. “aig — Algonquian languages”). The remaining 35 items are intended to cover remainder groups in ISO 639-2 and entire language groups in this part of ISO 639 (e.g. “afa — Afro-Asiatic (Other)” in ISO 639-2 and “afa — Afro-Asiatic languages” in this part of ISO 639).
According to the principles of ISO 639-2, the identifier “afa” will be assigned only to a document or information in (or about) an Afro-Asiatic language that does not have an individual-language identifier in Part 2, and that does not fall into the remainder groups “ber — Berber (Other)”, “cus — Cushitic (Other)”, or “sem — Semitic (Other)”, all of which are Afro-Asiatic language groups.
According to the principles of this part of ISO 639, the identifier “afa” may be assigned to a document or information in (or about) any Afro-Asiatic language. The use of “afa”, “sem”, or “ara” in a concrete case relating to Arabic, depends on the purpose of the encoding, as specified in the implementation.
The use of identifiers from this part of ISO 639 will depend on the purpose of the application. It is expected that user-defined subsets of the items in this part of ISO 639 will frequently be used in combination with, for example, the totality or defined subsets of ISO 639-2 or ISO 639-3.
4.3 Usage examples
The difference between an item as encoded in ISO 639-2 [e.g. “gem: Germanic (Other)”] and as encoded in this part of ISO 639 (e.g. “gem: Germanic languages”) is considered an implementational issue. Typical applications of the encoding of this part of ISO 639 include: encoding of linguistic items that relate to language families or groups rather than to individual languages: identification of language families or groups that are the objects of discussion in scientific texts or documents;retrieval of items that are encoded with language identifiers denoting several individual languages constituting a language family or group.
5 Maintenance of this language code
No separate organizational structure for the maintenance of this part of ISO 639 is established.
The Registration Authority responsible for the maintenance of ISO 639-2, the Library of Congress, will also be responsible for the maintenance of this part of ISO 639.
The procedural rules that are given in ISO 639-2:1998 (4.2 and Annex A) apply to this part of ISO 639.ISO 639-5 pdf download.