Who uses the ISO 639 codes and why?
There are a wide variety of processes for which it is necessary to identify the specific language beforehand. Language-based indexing and searching are fairly obvious examples from the realm of bibliographic applications, as is semantic interpretation. But there are a number of others: spell-checking, sorting, syllabification and hyphenation, morphological and syntactic parsing, fuzzy string searches and comparisons, speech recognition, speech synthesis, semantic associations, thesaurus lookups, and potentially many others. Using “the” name of a language as the means of language identification in machine applications poses two distinct problems of ambiguity. Firstly, different languages can have identical or very similar names. For example, there are four languages called Lele: Lele [lle] of Papua New Guinea (Austronesian); Lele [lel] of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Niger-Congo, Bantoid); Lele [lln] of Chad (Afro-Asiatic); Lele [llc] of Guinea (Niger-Congo, Mande). Conversely, the
