ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one. ISO has many meanings: Iso is the stem of the Latin transliteration of the Greek word ίσος (ísos, meaning equal). The iso- prefix in English derives from this and means equality or similarity. ... Writing Systems of the World today A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ...

Script is defined as "set of graphic characters used for the written form of one or more languages". So scripts that are not (yet) "used for the written form of one language" are explicitly excluded.

Where possible the codes are derived from ISO 639-2 where the name of a script and the name of a language using the script are identical (example: Gujarātī ISO 639 guj, ISO 15924 Gujr). Preference is given to the 639-2 Bibliographical codes, which is different to the otherwise often favored use of the Terminological codes. ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ...

ISO 15924 could be used, similarly to ISO 3166, in addition to ISO 639, which defines codes for natural languages, for instance in markup languages like HTML and XML to help Web browsers determine which typeface to use for foreign text. This way one could differentiate, for example, between Serbian written in the Cyrillic (srp-Cyrl) or Latin (srp-Latn) script, or mark romanized text as such. ISO 3166 is a three-part geographic coding standard for coding the names of countries and dependent areas, and the principal subdivisions thereof. ... ISO 639 is one of several international standards that lists short codes for language names. ... In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. ... An example of a web browser (Mozilla Firefox running under Microsoft Windows). ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Serbo-Croatian (srpskohrvatski or hrvatskosrpski) is a name for a language of the Western group of the South Slavic languages. ... In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ...

Maintenance

ISO has appointed the Unicode Consortium as the Registration Authority for the standard. In 2004, the Registration Authority appointed Michael Everson to act as Registrar.^[1] In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is a self-styled expert in the writing systems of the world. ...

Script codes

Numeric ranges

 000-099 Hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts 100-199 Right-to-left alphabetic scripts 200-299 Left-to-right alphabetic scripts 300-399 Alphasyllabic scripts 400-499 Syllabic scripts 500-599 Ideographic scripts 600-699 Undeciphered scripts 700-799 (unassigned) 800-899 (unassigned) 900-999 Private use, aliases, special codes 

Special codes

 Zxxx || 997 || Code for unwritten languages Zyyy || 998 || Code for undetermined script Zzzz || 999 || Code for uncoded script 

Qaaa-Qabx are 50 codes for private use. The Qaaa-Qabx range is not mentioned in the standard itself, but in the codelist.

See also

• List of ISO 15924 codes by letter code

This is the list of ISO 15924 codes by alpha-4 code as of 10 October 2006. ...

References

1. ^ Unicode - ISO 15924 Registration Authority

External links

• ISO 15924 Registration Authority (Unicode)
• Official ISO 15924 code lists

Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...