The international standard ISO-639
provides a list of two-letter codes for (natural) languages.
Examples for these codes are en for English, fr for French and
de for German.
For a software developer who needs to store the language of something, using these codes
is a good idea.
However, when an end user has to select the language for some reason (e.g. in an HTML form or the installation process of an application), it is more appropriate to use the full names of the languages in the language that the user understands (a German user knows his native language as Deutsch, he may not understand Allemand, the French word for German). This page offers a list of language names to be used in such a case. It is the goal to collect all language names in all languages.
The list is given as an XML file.
XML is a standard for storing structured data, learn more about its benefits at XML.com.
With one of the many available tools you can either load the data yourself or convert it into a format that you like better.
Each languagename element in the XML file provides one language name in one language.
It consists of three elements:
languagedescribed - the code of the language that is describedlanguageused - the code of the language that is used to describe the languagename - the language nameConfusing? Yes! Here is an example:
<languagename> <languageused>de</languageused> <languagedescribed>fr</languagedescribed> <name>Französisch</name> </languagename>
The code de is for German, fr is for French.
The name element thus contains the German name for French, which is Französisch.
As there are about 130 language codes, describing each language name with each language will result in a quite a long list. So far, names are only included in English and German. It is my big hope that, with the help of people around the world, this list will grow. If you speak another language, please take the time to translate the names into your language! Send them back to me, Marco Schmidt. I will then provide them here.
Finally, here is the list.