High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. In defining some of its language codes, some are defined as macrolanguages covering either borderline cases between strongly divergent dialects and very closely related languages (dialect continuums), or speech varieties that are considered to be either the same or different languages for ethnic or political rather than linguistic reasons. There are fifty-six languages in ISO 639-2 that are considered to be macrolanguages in ISO 639-3. The use of this category of macrolanguage has been applied in the Ethnologue 16th edition.