Support for languages without a 2-letter language code

Hi there,

We are a publishing platform using OJS that occasionally publishes content in two languages that do not have a 2-letter ISO 639-1 code (Åarjelsaemien gïele, or Southern Sami; and Julevsámegiella, or Lule Sami). The 3-letter codes (ISO 639-2) are sma and smj respectively.

At present, language attributes in the Crossref XML schema are based on the 2-letter ISO 639 codes, which means we are unable to correctly define the language when we send metadata for this content to Crossref. Best practice for language tags would be to allow 3-letter codes in these cases (BCP 47).

Would it be possible to relax the 2-letter language code restriction in the Crossref XML schema to provide better support for minoritized languages?

Hello, and thanks for your post.

I’ve notified my colleagues who manage the schema. We can’t make this change immediately, but they will take it into consideration for future schema updates.

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