Macro Language (ISO 639)

ISO 639-3 is the international standard for language codes. In the definition of some language codes, some of them are classified as macro languages , which include other languages ​​in the standard. This category exists to assist with comparisons between other sets of language codes, ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3. ISO 639-3 is curated by SIL International, and ISO 639-2 is curated by the U.S. Library of Congress.

Comparison often implies that it covers doubtful cases where two variants of a language can be considered strongly diverging dialects of one language or very closely related languages ​​( dialect continua ). It may also cover situations where there are linguistic varieties that are sometimes considered varieties of the same language, and sometimes different languages ​​for ethnic or political, but not linguistic, reasons. However, this is not its main function and the classification here is not uniform. For example, “ Chinese ” is a macro language spanning many languages that are not mutually intelligible, but the languages ​​“ German Standard ”, “ Bavarian German ” and other closely related languages ​​do not form a macro language at all, despite the fact that they are more mutually intelligible. Other examples include Tajik , which is not part of the Persian macro language , despite many lexical borrowings, and Urdu and Hindi do not form a macro language. Even all Hindi dialects are considered separate languages. In principle, ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 use different criteria for dividing language options into languages, 639-2 more in the general system of writing and literature, while 639-3 focuses on mutual understanding and general vocabulary. Macro languages ​​exist as part of the ISO 639-3 standard with code to make matching between the two sets easier.

• Macro language mapping ISO 639-3

There are fifty-six language codes in the ISO 639-2 standard that are considered macro languages ​​in ISO 639-3 ^[1] . The use of this category of macro languages ​​is used in Ethnologist , starting from the 16th edition ^[2] .

Some macro languages ​​did not have a specific language (as defined in 639-3) in ISO 639-2, for example, “ara” ( Arabic ), but ISO 639-3 recognizes various variants of the Arabic language as separate languages ​​in some cases. Others, like "nor" ( Norwegian ) has two separate parts (nno Nynorsk , nob Bokmol) as early as 639-2. This means that some languages ​​(for example, "arb" Standard Arabic ) that were in ISO 639-2 dialects of the same language ("ara") are now separate languages ​​in ISO 639-3 in certain contexts. This is an attempt to deal with variants of languages ​​that can be linguistically different from each other, but are interpreted by their speakers as forms of the same language, for example, in the case of diglossia . For example,

• Universal Arabic, 639-2 ^[3]
• Standard Arabic, 639-3 ^[4]

ISO 639-2 also includes codes for collections of languages; they do not match macro languages. These language collections are excluded from ISO 639-3 because they never refer to individual languages. Most of these codes are not included in the ISO 639-5 standard.