- published: 12 Feb 2015
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ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for language and language groups.
It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as ISO 639/R) and withdrawn in 2002. The ISO 639 set consists of six different parts.
The language codes defined in the several sections of ISO 639 are used for bibliographic purposes and, in computing and internet environments, as a key element of locale data. The codes also find use in various applications, such as Wikipedia URLs for its different language editions.
A multilingual page is contained by the CSS class "multilingual", with text in every language contained within the class "lang-xx", where xx is a lowercase ISO 639 two-letter or three-letter language code and the lang attribute. The lang attribute is contextually more correct, but the CSS required to hook into it is not supported by all browsers. If there is no two-letter code, the lowercase three-letter code is used. For text in an unknown language "und", (undetermined) is used.
The Sorbian languages (Serbsce, Serbski) are classified under the Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages. They are the native languages of the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany. Historically the language has also been known as Wendish or Lusatian. Their collective ISO 639-2 code is wen. It is closely related to Polish, Kashubian, Czech and Slovak.
There are two literary languages: Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbsce), spoken by about 40,000 people in Saxony, and Lower Sorbian (dolnoserbski) spoken by about 10,000 people in Brandenburg. The area where the two languages are spoken is known as Lusatia (Łužica in Upper Sorbian, Łužyca in Lower Sorbian, or Lausitz in German).
Both languages have the dual for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs; very few known living Indo-European languages retain this feature as a productive aspect of the grammar (see Slovenian grammar or Lithuanian grammar for other ones).
In Germany, Upper and Lower Sorbian are officially recognized and protected as minority languages. In the home areas of the Sorbs, both languages are officially equal to German.