UN M.49
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UN M.49, "Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use," is a set of numerical codes for countries and regions that is used by the United Nations. It assigns codes to regions of Africa as defined by the UN (see table below).
It is also possible to use some of these codes in language tagging and locales (see below). For almost all cases, however, the ISO-3166-1 two letter country codes are the most appropriate for locales and tagging web content (there are no region codes in ISO 3166). Selected UN M.49 codes might possibly find use where regional groupings are more appropriate for defining a particular language use.
UN M.49 Africa regional codes
| Code | Region | Countries included |
|---|---|---|
| 002 | Africa | All |
| 011 | Western Africa | Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo |
| 014 | Eastern Africa | Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Reunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe |
| 015 | Northern Africa | Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara |
| 017 | Middle Africa | Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Dem. Rep. of), Congo (Rep. of), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome e Principe |
| 018 | Southern Africa | Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland |
UN M.49 also includes codes for countries. These are not included here since the ISO-3166-1 two letter country codes would be used instead for any ICT localisation purpose.
Language tagging & UN M.49
According to RFC 5646 (http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5646/ ; see also Codes and Tags) it is possible to use UN M.49 codes in language tags, under certain circumstances where a regional specifier is needed instead of a country one.
Locales & UN M.49
It is possible to use UN M.49 codes in locales filed with CLDR.
Links
- United Nations
- United Nations Statistics Division
- Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49.htm
- Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions, geographical sub-regions, and selected economic and other groupings http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm
- United Nations Statistics Division
- Other
- Unicode CLDR http://unicode.org/cldr/data/diff/supplemental/territory_containment_un_m_49.html
- Territory Containment (UN M.49)
- Wikipedia, "UN M.49," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_M.49
- Unicode CLDR http://unicode.org/cldr/data/diff/supplemental/territory_containment_un_m_49.html
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