4.5 Languages and Scripts of the Material (Required)

Purpose and Scope

This element identifies the language(s), script(s), and symbol systems employed in the materials being described, particularly as they may affect its use.

Commentary: While most repositories in the United States will provide descriptions in English, it is frequently the case that some or all of a body of archival material is in other languages.

Language and script information may also be represented as codes for machine processing using the appropriate ISO codes for languages (ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2: Codes for the representation of names of languages) or scripts (ISO 15924: Codes for the representation of names of scripts).

Sources of Information

4.5.1 Derive the information from the materials themselves.

General Rules

4.5.2 Record the language(s) of the materials being described.

Materials entirely in English.

Collection is predominantly in Vietnamese; materials in English are indicated at the file level.

Most of the material in this series is in Finnish. Some correspondence in English, French, and Swedish.

All records are in Latvian unless otherwise noted.

In Dakota, with partial English translation.

Captions on photographs are in English, French, and Spanish.

Japanese film subtitled in English and dubbed in French.

4.5.3 Record information about any distinctive alphabets, scripts, symbol systems, or abbreviations employed.

Later additions are in a seventeenth-century hand.

Several pamphlets in this series are in German Fraktur.

4.5.4 If there is no language content, record “no linguistic content.”