Standards

We are actively engaged in developing standards for language data. In collaboration with others in the industry, progress is being made on the following open standards.

Unicode

Unicode is an industry-wide character set encoding standard designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. Closely related to ISO/IEC 10646.

World Language Registry (ISO 693-3)

ISO 639-3 is the International Organization for Standardization’s registry of the languages of the world. It is comprised of living languages taken from SIL’s Ethnologue, as well as extinct, ancient, reconstructed, and artificial languages. The current registry includes over 7000 languages, each identified by a unique three-letter code.

Lexicon Interchange Format (LIFT)

LIFT (Lexicon Interchange FormaT) is an XML format for lexical information (dictionaries). LIFT allows movement of data between programs such as FieldWorks, WeSay, and Lexique Pro.

Get Involved!

Want to get involved? Check out our paid, supported, and volunteer positions.

Serve with SIL!