I had sent a report to the ISO 639-5 RA on last 19 May 2012 about the incoherent status of Bihari betwen ISO 639-3 (which describes it as a "collection" code) and ISO 639-5 where it was still not listed.
The report was forgotten for several months (someone in charge of the RA got retired and nobody noticed the report). So I then joined them again on 7 July 2012 to query them about the status of the report (nothing was replied since then). Finally they replied me in last August 8 2012 with this : [citation] After further consultation with our colleagues on the ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee, it was determined that the code for Bihari should be added to the ISO 639-5 code list. The code will be added to ISO 639-5 as such: [bih] for Bihari languages (in French: langues bihari); the hierarchy will be: ine, iir, bih (Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Bihari). The data will be entered into our system, though it may take a few weeks before the public information is displayed on the ISO 639-5 RA website. [/citation] But not we are about 30 weeks later and nothing has changed. The last updates published by ISO 639-5 RA are only dated in February... 2009 (4 years ago). Is this ISO 639-5 RA really active (i.e. the Library of Congress, for the administrative part, but also the ISO comity) ? Could we consider that the ISO 639-5 standard is in fact completely defunct ?
