Languages listed in ISO 639:

[Ingeborg van Gijn]

Dear members of this list,

I'd like to propose to use the international country abbreviations after
the first s for sign language, Richard Arnold proposed. The advantage is
that also peolpe not familiair with sign languages and their names,
recognize immediately what sign language is meant. There are however some
problems with this proposal.

One: there are a lot of spoken languages listed already that start with an s.

Two: a lot of countries have an abbreviation consisiting of only one
letter. And I don't know whether the ISO 639 language code can consist of
only two letters. For abbreviations of three letters, we could take the
first two letters of the abbreviation.

Three: there is, as far as I know, no Belgian sign language. There is
Flemish/Dutch Sign Language spoken by the deaf in the Dutch spoken language
area of Belgium, but I don't know whether the deaf in the French spoken
language area of Belgium speak this sign language too. And there are
probably more countries with the same sort of problem.

Four: I haven't checked yet, but there will probably be some, or even a lot
of overlap with already existing codes for spoken languages.

Anyway, it is just an idea, and we would get something like the following:

snl     Sign Language of the Netherlands
sdk     Danisch Sign Language
se      Spanish Sign Language
sfr     French Sign Language
sf      Finnish Sign language
sgb     British Sign language
etc.

I hope we can find a good solution for listing sign languages in the ISO 639.

Yours sincerely,
Ingeborg van Gijn

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Ingeborg van Gijn
Department of General Linguistics
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT  Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)20 525 3107
Fax: +31 (0)20 525 3021
E-mail: ingeborg at hum.uva.nl
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