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We have a table for countries, using ISO 3166-1 standard, also languages, using ISO 639-1. Now we need a table for nationalities, but I can't find a standard for abbreviating or indexing them.

Country and nationality does not always relate, i.e. there is Scottish nationality, but Scotland doesn't have it's own alpha-2 country code.

arnaslu
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    Maybe you should be using ISO 3166-2 and ISO 3166-2:GB instead of ISO 3166-1? – Colin 't Hart Jan 27 '14 at 13:56
  • Seems like ISO 3166-2 could work, i.e. Scottish and Welsh could be indicated as GB-SCT and GB-WLS respectively. Thank you. – arnaslu Jan 27 '14 at 14:11
  • Follow up question :) Is there authoritative list of nationalities out there? I found several, but they all vary. Going through ISO 3166-2, for example, US-PR (Puerto Rico) has nationality, but US-CA (state of California) doesn't. GB and US are cases I'm familiar with, but it gets more confusing when dealing with unfamiliar world countries. – arnaslu Jan 27 '14 at 14:16
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    Countries are confusing things :-) The best you can do is probably either follow ISO 3166-2 including the classification of countries, provinces etc, or make your own superset of things that could be countries and/or nationalities. It all depends what you are going to use it for. – Colin 't Hart Jan 27 '14 at 14:31
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    "there is Scottish nationality" - are you sure? I'll give you ethnicity, but there are no Scottish passports... (as of January 2014; this might change following a Scottish vote for independence of course!) – AakashM Jan 28 '14 at 09:38
  • What meaning of "nationality" are you asking about? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality is about a legal relationship between a person and a state, which entitles the person to things like passports and diplomatic protection from the state. That is clearly not what you are talking about, because Scotland is not a state. – user102008 Jan 29 '14 at 05:49
  • "Nationality" here is information in user profile. In case of Scotland, most Scottish people consider themselves Scottish, not British, so we want to offer both options http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/26/where-in-scotland-people-feel-not-british – arnaslu Jan 29 '14 at 08:41

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