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Languages in the Penn Library Collections

What are the languages Penn Library books and other materials use?

Franklin, the Penn Library's online catalog, employs language codes compliant with the ISO 639-2 and ANSI Z39.53 standards managed by the Library Congress. Although Franklin users may limit search results to specific languages, it is not possible for public users to search directly by language code.

This table, compiled on 19 February 2004, counts active titles -- individual bibliographic records -- in Franklin. The counts have been cleaned: for instance, titles identified as "Miscellaneous languages" have been examined and placed under recognizable (and in some cases, non-standard) language names.

The fine print

"Is this everything?"
No. Although this table reports languages of books, journals, videos, sound recordings, and electronic resources in Franklin, you should use the "Percent of Total" column as a guide to the Penn Library collections, rather than the "Titles counted" column. Active or unsuppressed bibliographic records in Franklin may have been missed if they lacked a language code. Items using two or more languages may have been coded for the prominent language or relegated to "Multiple languages", depending upon cataloging practice. And, of course, a "single-language" journal may have an article or two in another language!

"Where's my language?"
This table uses MARC 21 language codes, as maintained by the Library of Congress for the bibliographic description of information resources. Sparsely-published languages may be grouped into generic categories, such as "Bantu (other)" or "Eskimo languages" [a superseded name replaced by several other names but used here as a fossil code]. An interesting discussion of the language coding is provided at Ethnologue's web page, "Mapping between ISO 639 Language Codes and the Languages Identified in the Ethnologue". For more information on MARC 21 language codes, see "MARC code list for languages" (Library of Congress web).

Mistakes have been made.
This table uses MARC 21 language codes appearing in the MARC bibliographic record format's field 008/35-37 "Fixed-Length Data Elements / Language". Fossil codes and errors have been corrected through examination of individual Franklin records. Several non-standard language names appear: for instance, Ainu and Burashaski, treated by MARC as "Miscellaneous languages", were added to highlight their presence; identifications for Serbian and Croatian were based upon coding or bibliographic notes, but Serbo-Croatian was added where Roman or Cyrillic script was not indicated.