ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what a human language is, as well as other related concepts, such as language families and groups, language varieties, and dialects. The first part of the chapter provides an outline-like reference to the many stakeholders and standards used to encode or otherwise characterize languages and language varieties, while the second part of the chapter provides a more detailed review of the history and future directions affecting the creation, maintenance, and application of language identifiers, codes, and tags.
