ISO 3166
The ISO 3166 is a standard for the encoding of geographic units, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
It consists of three parts for coding
- current states and some dependent territories (ISO 3166-1),
- government sub-units ( ISO 3166-2 ) and
- former states ( ISO 3166-3 ).
The country codes can be looked up in the ISO 3166-1 coding list .
The ISO publishes the current coding lists on a website , on which changes are continuously updated. New print versions of the standard are published at irregular intervals in which the changes made up to that point are consolidated. Up until the 2013 versions were published, changes were distributed as newsletters .
The current versions of the ISO standard were published in 2013. The German Institute for Standardization developed the corresponding translations into German with DIN EN ISO 3166-1: 2014-10 .
At the beginning of 2019 a preliminary version of a new version was published with ISO / DIS 3166-1: 2019, which was published as a draft standard by the German Institute for Standardization in October 2019. The content of the revised International Standard was adopted in full, but the German language version was dispensed with. Only the terms and their definitions are translated into German. The list section has also been deleted; instead, reference is made to the ISO's online browsing platform and the corresponding official sources of the German country names for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
ISO 3166-1
DIN EN ISO 3166-1 | |
---|---|
Area | Information and documentation |
title | Codes for the names of countries and their sub-units - Part 1: Codes for country names (ISO / DIS 3166-1: 2019) |
Brief description: | Country code |
Latest edition | 2019-10 (draft standard) |
ISO | 3166-1 |
The first part ( ISO 3166-1 ) lists since 1974 a. a. two- (ALPHA-2) and three-letter (ALPHA-3) country codes. Countries are marked with capital letters. The two-letter abbreviations are used, among other things, as a top-level domain identifier for states (e.g. .de , .ch , .us ) - with the exception of the United Kingdom , for which uk
was gb
used.
The ALPHA-2 codes also form the first two characters for the currency codes according to ISO 4217 .
They are also used in the international bank account number (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.
Numerical codes
In addition to the two codings using “Latin” letters , three-digit codes from “Arabic numerals” are also used. As early as the 1960s - long before ISO - today's UN statistical department , the UNSD , had introduced these codes, which were adopted unchanged in ISO 3166.
Each coding corresponds exactly to one territorial area. If a state area changes due to division or amalgamation, the new territories also receive new codes. If, on the other hand, only the name of the state changes, the numerical code and sometimes even the alpha-2 code remain unchanged.
Examples:
- Until 1990: Federal Republic of Germany =
280
, West Berlin =284
; in addition GDR =278
as well as East Berlin =282
.
From 1990, all together:276
.
The codingDE
for (West) Germany , however, did not change.
Note the far-sighted area reserved from the start276, 278, 280, 282, 284
. -
Ethiopia was
230
coded with until 1993 . After splitting off from Eritrea (code232
), the remaining Ethiopia received the coding231
.
- Burma was renamed Myanmar . The national territory did not change, it remained the same
104
. However, the alpha-2 code changed fromBU
toMM
.
- Burma was renamed Myanmar . The national territory did not change, it remained the same
- Swaziland renamed itself Eswatini in 2018 . The alpha-2 code
SZ
and the numeric code748
were retained.
The original sequence formed alphabetically the names of the states at that time (in English) or summarized regionally related structures - such as island groups or the example mentioned DE
. As a rule, even numbers between 002
and are initially 898
assigned. If sub-areas are inserted, the closest (if necessary, odd) number is used, as is the case with the names of newly formed states.
As they are not used by the UN for the time being, codes 000 and 900–999 can be assigned custom meanings at your own risk.
The advantage of the digits is that they are also used in many non-Latin scripts, such as the Greek , Cyrillic , Hebrew , Chinese or Japanese script. This means that statistical tables can be read there in which the legend, states and dates are indicated by digits. However, it is precisely the Arabic script that does not use what we call “Arabic” numerals.
Geographical (ISO 3166) and linguistic (ISO 639) classification
Unlike the standard, the country coding is often given in lower case letters. This can lead to confusion with the ISO-639 language codes, which 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
stand for Belgium / Belarusian (Belarus).
While ISO 3166 describes the geographical classification, ISO 639 defines the linguistic classification.
- For example, the geographical division for Greece is
GR
while the linguistic division for the Greek languageel
is. - The abbreviation
EU
/eu
stands on the one hand for the geographical division of the European Union , on the other hand for the linguistic division of the Basque language . - The abbreviation
AF
/af
stands for Afghanistan on the one hand , and the Afrikaans language on the other .
The division into geography and language still makes sense: For example, German is not only spoken in Germany and French is not only spoken in France; there are also countries that have more than one official language (e.g. Switzerland) or a language that is named after another country (e.g. Brazil with Portuguese).
In combination with the language code according to ISO 639 for Languages declared the 5646 RFC , the specification of language abbreviations , as they for Locales used for. B. en_US
(English language in United States Territory; American) as opposed to en_GB
(English language in United Kingdom; British). The language abbreviations are symbolized here by lower case letters, the countries by upper case letters.
In addition to the underscore (Engl. Underscore ) often comes as a separator, the hyphen is used. Locales not only define a national language or regional language, but are also used for localization .
Historical newsletters
The version from 2006 (ISO 3166-1: 2006) summarized all changes up to newsletter V-12. Before the publication of ISO 3166-1: 2013, the following newsletters were issued:
Edition newsletter | Release date | Changes |
---|---|---|
VI-1 (PDF; 264 kB) | September 21, 2007 | Changes in the French overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Saint Martin |
VI-2 (PDF) | March 31, 2008 | Change of name of Montenegro and Moldova |
VI-3 (PDF; 269 kB) | September 9, 2008 | Change of name of Nepal , change of official languages of Greenland , Guernsey and Moldova |
VI-4 (PDF; 211 kB) | January 7, 2009 | Change of name of Moldova , change of the official languages of the Central African Republic and the Comoros |
VI-5 (PDF; 195 kB) | March 3, 2009 | Change of name of Venezuela , change of the official languages of Kiribati and Tuvalu |
VI-6 (PDF; 164 kB) | May 8, 2009 | Change of name of Bolivia |
VI-7 (PDF; 245 kB) | February 22, 2010 | Change of name of Saint Helena |
VI-8 (PDF; 377 kB) | December 15, 2010 | Dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles |
VI-9 (PDF; 184 kB) | June 12, 2011 (corrected July 14, 2011) |
Name change from Fiji and Myanmar , corrections |
VI-10 (PDF; 162 kB) | August 9, 2011 | Founding of South Sudan |
VI-11 (PDF; 137 kB) | November 8, 2011 | Change of name of Libya |
VI-12 (PDF; 395 kB) | February 15, 2012 | Change of name of Hungary , corrections |
VI-13 (PDF; 155 kB) | 2nd August 2012 | Name change of Eritrea , corrections |
VI-14 (PDF; 176 kB) | February 6, 2013 | Change of name of Palestine , corrections |
VI-15 (PDF) | May 10, 2013 | Change of name of Papua New Guinea |
VI-16 (PDF) | July 11th 2013 | Change of name from Somalia |
ISO 3166-2
A more recent standard ISO 3166-2 defines short forms for the subdivisions of countries or dependent areas. For example, in the case of Germany, these are the federal states . The country code (e.g. DE
) is followed by the ISO-3166-2 variant code. This is added to the country code, separated by a hyphen (e.g. DE-BY
for the state of Bavaria ).
ISO 3166-3
DIN ISO 3166-3 | |
---|---|
Area | Information and documentation |
title | Codes for names of countries and their sub-units - Part 3: Code for previously used country names (ISO 3166-3: 2013) |
Brief description: | Country code |
Latest edition | 2015-03 |
ISO | 3166-3 |
Since 1974, ISO 3166-3 has mapped all countries that no longer exist or whose abbreviations have changed due to significant changes in the country name (e.g. due to mergers of countries or divisions).
See also
- ISO-3166-1 coding list
- List of vehicle nationality symbols
- EUROSTAT region codes
- Language codes according to ISO 639
- UN / LOCODE - United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations
- List of Olympic team abbreviations
literature
- DIN EN ISO 3166-1: 2014-10, October 2014 edition , German-language version of ISO 3166-1, published by the German Institute for Standardization (DIN)
- DIN EN ISO 3166-1: 2019-10, October 2019 edition / draft standard, published by the German Institute for Standardization (DIN)
- ÖNORM EN ISO 3166-1: 2015 07 01, October 2014 edition , German-language version of ISO 3166-1, published by Austrian Standards International (ASI)
- SN EN ISO 3166-1, September 2014 edition , German-language version of ISO 3166-1, published by the Swiss Association for Standardization (SNV)
Web links
- ISO: Online Browsing Platform for ISO 3166 country codes (English)
- Nations Online Project: International Country Codes - Code as alpha-2, alpha-3, UN numeric-3, FIPS 10-4 (English)
- UNSD: Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49) - List of M49 and alpha-3 codes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Online Browsing Platform
- ↑ Draft standard - DIN EN ISO 3166-1 - Codes for the names of countries and their sub-units - Part 1: Codes for country names (ISO / DIS 3166-1: 2019). In: DIN standards committee for information and documentation (NID). DIN, October 2019, accessed on December 31, 2019 .
- ↑ UN Statistical Department: Coding