As part of a project I am working on, I need to request a user to specify their primary language. Rather than allow the user to enter this information in a free-text mode, it is preferable to have the user select the language from a dropdown list.
Since the definition of a single language is to some extent arbitrary, there are lierally thousands of languages or dialects spoken around the world. It would be inpractical to list them all.
So, in collating this list of languages, I have decided to use the list of languages that Microsoft use, and double check it against Wikipedia’s list of most commonly used languages.
Secondly, I would like the database to store the information based on the ISO 639 code for languages (2 letters)
Here is the list i have come up with. There are 72 entries
| Language | Code |
|---|---|
| Afrikaans | AF |
| Albanian | SQ |
| Arabic | AR |
| Armenian | HY |
| Basque | EU |
| Bengali | BN |
| Bulgarian | BG |
| Catalan | CA |
| Cambodian | KM |
| Chinese (Mandarin) | ZH |
| Croatian | HR |
| Czech | CS |
| Danish | DA |
| Dutch | NL |
| English | EN |
| Estonian | ET |
| Fiji | FJ |
| Finnish | FI |
| French | FR |
| Georgian | KA |
| German | DE |
| Greek | EL |
| Gujarati | GU |
| Hebrew | HE |
| Hindi | HI |
| Hungarian | HU |
| Icelandic | IS |
| Indonesian | ID |
| Irish | GA |
| Italian | IT |
| Japanese | JA |
| Javanese | JW |
| Korean | KO |
| Latin | LA |
| Latvian | LV |
| Lithuanian | LT |
| Macedonian | MK |
| Malay | MS |
| Malayalam | ML |
| Maltese | MT |
| Maori | MI |
| Marathi | MR |
| Mongolian | MN |
| Nepali | NE |
| Norwegian | NO |
| Persian | FA |
| Polish | PL |
| Portuguese | PT |
| Punjabi | PA |
| Quechua | QU |
| Romanian | RO |
| Russian | RU |
| Samoan | SM |
| Serbian | SR |
| Slovak | SK |
| Slovenian | SL |
| Spanish | ES |
| Swahili | SW |
| Swedish | SV |
| Tamil | TA |
| Tatar | TT |
| Telugu | TE |
| Thai | TH |
| Tibetan | BO |
| Tonga | TO |
| Turkish | TR |
| Ukrainian | UK |
| Urdu | UR |
| Uzbek | UZ |
| Vietnamese | VI |
| Welsh | CY |
| Xhosa | XH |
Hey, thanks a lot for this list. However, note that the download links are broken (they seem to be using some internal hostname).
Thanks, well spotted. I have updated the links.
Thanks! And some typos
Afrikaans
Croatian
Ukrainian
Well spotted. I have updated the post.
You are wicked awesome. Thanks for compiling this list.
This is amazing. Thank you so much for putting this out there for everybody!
I combined these into a PHP associative array if anybody needs it: http://pastebin.com/Lfqe15vJ
Thanks for this. However both Fiji and Tonga should say “Fijian” and “Tongan”. Cheers.
Thanks for your work on this! Saves me a ton of time. You are a gentleman and scholar!
Thanks so much for this very useful list. Going to use it in https://gibbonedu.org, which is an open source platform for education. Thanks!
2015 and this list is still amazing!
Thanks you!
Afrikaans is spelled incorrectly in the linked XLS file! Just so you know. 🙂