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 |
|---|---|
| Afrikanns | AF |
| Albanian | SQ |
| Arabic | AR |
| Armenian | HY |
| Basque | EU |
| Bengali | BN |
| Bulgarian | BG |
| Catalan | CA |
| Cambodian | KM |
| Chinese (Mandarin) | ZH |
| Croation | 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 |
| Ukranian | UK |
| Urdu | UR |
| Uzbek | UZ |
| Vietnamese | VI |
| Welsh | CY |
| Xhosa | XH |
