ISO 15924

Codes for the representation of names of scripts – Codes pour la représentation des noms d’écritures

ISO 15924 (Information and Documentation – Codes for the Representation of Names of Scripts) is an international standard that defines 4-letter and 3-digit codes to uniquely identify scripts used for the common written form of one or more languages. The standard also lists the most common names of these scripts (or descriptions for special script codes) used in the normative ISO documentation published in English and French (other languages are displayed on this page by a translation edited locally on this site), and also links them (when appropriate) to the version (age) of the Unicode standard in which characters were first assigned to support a significant part of each script, at least for the most important languages using it in their most common orthography (along with the "property value alias" defined for this script in the Unicode Character Database), and finally gives the date of last change of each entry (along with some basic info in the notice of changes for what type of info was added/changed/corrected/removed in each entry).

• Where the name of the script is identical to the name of the language, the first three letters of the 4-letter code are usually matching the 3-letter language codes designated by ISO 639-2 for this language, but the script code may still be used for many other languages (including for transliteration purposes). The fourth letter in each code may be used to distinguish variants of presentation, that do not require a change of the orthographic system for texts in the same language encoded with the Unicode/IEC/ISO/10646 standard (or any compatible encoding which can be unambiguously mapped to it). Those codes for script variants are listed below with “Support: Maybe” on rows emphasized by a yellow background, as they are usually not needed for any translated texts but may only be useful to tune their rendering to help readers. The conversion of encoded texts between these variants should be automatable with loss of precision.
• Some scripts may have been recently encoded in Unicode (as indicated by their assigned “Unicode property alias”), but still don't have at least one known font implementing them (with Unicode mappings and a sufficient coverage, with glyphs defined for all important individual characters or mandatory clusters) that can be freely downloaded and installed on common operating systems. Translating to languages using these scripts on this wiki is not recommended for now as it is very difficult for most contributor to check the actual meaning or accuracy of these texts as long that such font is not available for general use. Those script codes are listed below with “Support: Later” on rows emphasized by a orange background (this may change later when such font will be found and available worldwide).
• Finally there also exists standard codes assigned for scripts that are still not (or will never be) encoded in the Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 standard, or codes only assigned for special purposes not identifying a single script (or a group of scripts used together in the same language), as well as a range of codes that may be used privately inside applications but that require specific agreement. Those script codes are listed below with “Support: No” on rows emphasized by a red background, as they are not usable for creating interchangeable translations. Some scripts (also listed with this red background) are assigned unique codes for broad classification purposes or for internal use by specific applications but are still not (or won't be) encoded with a standard set of characters in Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646, so translating texts into languages using these scripts is still not (or won't be) possible on this wiki.

See also :

• ISO 15924 Registration Agency (on the Unicode website)
• Supported Scripts in Unicode (on the Unicode website)
• wikipedia:ISO 15924 (on English Wikipedia)
• Google Noto Fonts (extensive open-sourced collection of free fonts to support all scripts encoded in Unicode)
• WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Unicode Fonts (well-documented site listing many free or proprietary fonts that support all scripts encoded with Unicode, last updated up to end of 2011, i.e. up to Unicode 6.0)
• Script Encoding Initiative: List of scripts that are not yet officially encoded in the Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 standard (some of them may already have an ISO 15924 code listed below)