macrolanguage

1. A "language" by common usage, which is in fact a dialect continuum consisting of widely varying varieties that may be distinct languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility.

2. A group of mutually intelligible speech varieties that have no traditional name in common, and which may be considered distinct languages by their speakers.

3. A book-keeping device where – when a language as defined under the ISO 639-2 standard developed by the US Library of Congress, for the purpose of encoding the languages that published books are written in, does not correspond to a single language under the ISO 639-3 standard developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, for the purpose of listing all the world's languages in their publication Ethnologue – the ISO 639-2 language is assigned an ISO 639-3 code as a "macrolanguage".

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