What’s this?

If you’ve visited this page from the submission page, you might be wondering why you have to specify the language(s) used for a nonsense entry…

The language codes used for each entry are mostly useful as metadata, to let others analyze languages used in entries, and so on. They are not shown yet on the platform, but other applications may display the language codes available in the API responses.

How do I specify one or more languages in my entry?

Most of the entries on Nontrinsic are in English; if that’s the case for your own entry, you’ll want to select English for the language used in your entry.

If you’re including other languages in one entry, be sure to add the languages in order:

• Select the most significant language, all the way to the least significant language used in the entry.
• If the languages used are equally significant, then first select the language that appears first in the entry, then the rest of the languages used in the entry.

In the database, we mostly use ISO 639-1 language codes. However, when it comes to languages that aren’t available in ISO 639-1, we use ISO 639-3 language codes instead. ISO 639-1 language codes are two letters long, while ISO 639-3 language codes are three letters long.

The language selector might not have all the languages you’d expect, but you can enter your own ISO 639-3 language code(s).

What if my entry doesn’t use a particular language?

If your entry is absolute nonsense (really), here’s how to specify the language:

• My entry has nonsensical language that is not based on any existing language, keyboard smashes, …
  • Select Undetermined und
• My entry only has random characters (other than letters that make words), emojis, mojibake, …
  • Select No linguistic content zxx