Collection: Language

This property is: Recommended.

Definition

The language of items in the collection.

Examples

Examples of values for this property, and an explanation of the reasoning for the values.
Value Explanation
en

Items in the following collections are in English only:

  • EDINA BIOSIS
  • Education Image Gallery
  • Education Media OnLine
  • EDINA Index to The Times, 1790-1980
  • EDINA SALSER
  • EDINA UPDATE
en-gb

The following collections have items in English used in the United Kingdom only:

  • AHDS Archaeology
  • EDINA Inspec
  • Statistical Accounts of Scotland
de

The Zetoc collection has items in four languages:

  • German
  • English
  • French
  • Japanese
en
fr
jp
cy

The AHDS History collection has items in nine languages:

  • Welsh
  • Danish
  • German
  • English
  • Spanish; Castilian
  • French
  • Latin
  • Norwegian
  • Russian
da
de
en
es
fr
la
no
ru
en

A collection where each individual item is either in:

  • English
  • French
  • Multiple languages
fr
mul
fr-ca A collection with items in French used in Canada only.

Guidelines

The depth of analysis is at your discretion, but you should attempt to capture all languages represented by the intellectual content of the collection.

The terms used to encode languages are defined by RFC 3066. They may be:

  1. a two-letter language code taken from ISO 639 part 1
    or
    a three-letter language code taken from ISO 639 part 2
    • When a language in ISO 639 has both a two-letter and three-letter code, use the two-letter code; when it has only a three-letter code, use the three-letter code
  2. optionally
    followed by a two-letter country code taken from ISO 3166
    • If a country code is included then separate the country code from the language code with a hyphen ("-"), for instance en-gb

Some language values, such as the value en, for English, may be qualified by country. This is optional and should only be used for countries where English is the native language. This is mainly for use with English used in the United Kingdom (en-gb) and American English (en-us). Another example is fr-ca for French used in Canada . Do not qualify en by country of origin where English is not the principal language. For instance, do not use en-es for Spanish English. If in doubt use en only.

Terms should be entered in lower case.

If the content of the collection has items in more than one language do not use mul (for Multiple languages): each language value should be entered separately. However it is possible that an individual item in the collection may be in multiple languages, so mul would be a valid language value fir the collection in that instance.

References

  1. [ISO 639] http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
  2. [ISO 3166] http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

Occurrence

Repeatable: there may be multiple values for this property. Enter each value into its own text box.