ISO 3166

The ISO 3166 is a standard for the encoding of geographical units issued by the International Organization for Standardization ( ISO).

It consists of three parts for encoding

  • Current states and some dependent territories (ISO 3166-1 )
  • Governmental subunits (ISO 3166-2 ) and
  • Former State (ISO 3166-3 ).

Country codes can be looked up in the ISO -3166 -1 Kodierliste.

ISO 3166-1

The first part ( ISO 3166-1 ) lists, since 1974, inter alia, two - (ALPHA -2) and three-letter (ALPHA -3) country code on. Countries are thereby indicated by uppercase letters. The two-letter abbreviations are used among other things as a top -level domain designator for States (eg de, ch, us. .. ) - With the exception of the United Kingdom, was used for the uk gb instead.

The ALPHA -2 codes also form the first two characters for the currency code according to ISO 4217th

They are further used in the IBAN, in ISO 7372, ISO 9375, ISO / IEC 7501-1 ( standard for machine readable travel documents ), the UN / LOCODE and the WIPO Standard ST.3.

AA, ZZ and the areas QM -QZ and XA - XZ are reserved for private use.

The default is continuously updated by so-called newsletter. The current 6th edition (ISO 3166-1:2006 ) summarizes all changes to the Newsletter V -12. Since then the following newsletters have been published:

See also: ISO -3166 -1 Kodierliste

Numeric Codes

Besides the two encodings by means of " Latin " letters three -digit codes are from " Arabic numerals " used. Already in the 1960s - long before the ISO - had today's Statistical Division of the United Nations, the UNSD, introduced these codes, which are each taken over unchanged in the ISO 3166.

Each code corresponds to exactly one territorial area. Changes a territory by splitting or merger, the new territories also get new codes. Changes, however, only the name of the state, the numerical code remains unchanged.

  • Until 1990: BRD = 280, West Berlin = 284; to DDR = 278 and East Berlin = 282 From 1990, all together: 276 The coding DE for (West) Germany did not change it. Note the farsighted priori reserved area 276, 278, 280, 282, 284
  • Ethiopia was coded to 1993 with 230. After cleavage of Eritrea (code 232), Ethiopia received the remaining coding 231
  • Burma was given the new name of Myanmar. The territory did not change, it stayed at 104 the other hand, changed the alpha - 2 code of BU to MM

The original sequence formed alphabetically the then State names ( in English) from or summed together regionally owned entities - such as island groups, or the above example, DE - together. In general, numbers 002-898 are awarded initially straight. For insertion of subregions then possible a closest (if necessary odd) number is used likewise. Near the names of newly formed states

Since they are not used by the UN for the time being, the codes can get 000 and 900-999 at your own risk custom meanings.

Advantage of the numbers is that they are also used in many non- Latin scripts, as in Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese or Japanese writing. This statistical tables can be read there, where legend states and data are indicated by numerals. Ironically, however, the Arabic script is not used by us so -called "Arab " numerals.

Geographical (ISO 3166) and linguistic (ISO 639 ) Classification

The country code is specified by the standard deviation often in lowercase. This can lead to confusion with the ISO - 639 language codes that are often but not always encode, the most widely spoken language in this country. DE / de stand for Germany / German, FR / fr stand for France / French, but BE / be available for Belgium / white russian ( belarus ).

While ISO 3166 describes the geographical division, ISO 639 defines the linguistic classification.

  • For example, given the geographical division for Greece GR, while the linguistic classification for the Greek language is el.
  • The abbreviation EU / eu only stands for the geographical division European Union, on the other hand, for the linguistic classification Basque language.
  • The abbreviation AF / af is on the one hand for Afghanistan, on the other hand for Afrikaans.

The classification into geography and language results nevertheless sense: for example, is that German is not only spoken not only in Germany and French in France; In addition, there are countries that have more than one official language ( eg Switzerland ) or a language that is named after a different country (eg Brazil with Portuguese).

In combination with the language code according to ISO 639 for languages ​​of RFC 5646 explains the specification of language abbreviations how to use them for locales such as en_US ( English language in the territory of the United States of America, American ) as opposed to en_GB ( English language in the territory of the United Kingdom; British). The language codes are symbolized by lowercase letters, the countries in capital letters. In addition to the underscore (English underscore) is used as separator also often the hyphen used. Locales but not only define a language or regional language, but also be used for localization.

ISO 3166-2

A more recent standard ISO 3166-2 defines short forms for the subdivisions of countries or dependent territories. For example, these are the states in the case of Germany. To this end, following the country code (eg DE ) nor ISO -3166 -2- Variant Code. This is also separated by an underscore or hyphen, the country code appended ( for example, DE -BY for the state of Bavaria ).

ISO 3166-3

ISO 3166-3 forms since 1974 from all countries that no longer exist or their shortcuts have changed because of a significant change in the country name (for example, by groupings of countries or country divisions).

Guadeloupe Saint Martin Central African Republic Bolivia BRD (Germany) States of Germany Microsoft Access
8097
de