Extended languages in HOLLIS (codes from ISO 639-3)

Background

The traditional list of ~400 languages (“MARC languages”) used in library cataloging is maintained by the Library of Congress.
An extended list of ~ 8,000 languages (ISO 639-3) has been permitted in library cataloging since approximately 2022, though not adopted by all libraries that contribute to WorldCat.

- The language of the book is cataloged English, Amharic, and ‘Afro-Asiatic (Other)’ based on the MARC list of languages.
- The language ‘Dime’ has been added based on the ISO list. Dime is a more specific language that does not have its own code in MARC, and falls into the ‘Afro-asiatic (Other)’ collective MARC code.
- An Advanced Search for code ‘dim’ will retrieve records cataloged with this code.
- Older records will only be retrieved using the ‘afa’ (Afro-asiatic (Other)) code. They will likely have the name of the language somewhere else in the record.

The new codes will often only be in newer cataloging records.
For records that follow established guidelines (PCC), if a record uses one of the new more specific codes, it will still include the older more general code (“collective” code).
- “dim“ (Dime) more specific code from ISO
- “afa” (Afro-Asiatic Other) MARC collective code
Newer records that do not follow established guidelines may have only the ISO code, if the language is not represented in the MARC list.
Older records may not have the ISO code.
When you search by language code, you may need to try both to see all relevant results.

Languages from both lists (MARC, ISO-639-3) are translated from their 3-character codes to their display names and shown in the Details section.
In the Language facet/filter, only values from the shorter MARC language list are included.
Languages from other source codes such as ‘austlang’ are not displayed.
All codes in MARC fields 008 and 041 are searchable in the Advanced Search “Code: Language” field, regardless of which language scheme is used.
A searchable database of the ISO language codes is available at https://iso639-3.sil.org/code_tables/639/data.
A mapping from ISO codes to MARC collective codes is available at https://iso639-3.sil.org/code_tables/macrolanguage_mappings/data

iso639-3.sil.org is the source of the codes and official maintainer of the list. The tables used in HOLLIS were downloaded from https://iso639-3.sil.org/code_tables/download_tables in July 2025.

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