Macrolanguages / ISO 639 macrolanguage - Language Code

ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. In defining some of its language codes, some are defined as macrolanguages covering either significantly different dialects or a net of very closely related languages. There are fifty-six languages in ISO 639-2 that are considered to be macrolanguages in ISO 639-3.

The following are the largest ISO 639 macrolanguages, which in different sources may be counted as either one or several languages.

* Chinese language (ca. 1,300 million)
* Hindustani language (ca. 900 million)
* Arabic language (ca. 227 million)
* Serbo-Croatian language (ca. 47 million)
* Pashto language (ca. 40 million)
* Persian language (ca. 30 million, second language up to 100 million)
* Azerbaijani language (ca. 25 million)
* Oromo language (ca. 25 million)
* Uzbek language (ca. 23 million)
* Malay language (ca. 23 million)
* Malagasy language (ca. 17 million)
* Kurdish language (ca. 16 million)
* Fula language (ca. 15 million)
* Zhuang language (ca. 14 million)
* Swahili language (5-10 million, second language up to 80 million)