Language names and language codes: connecting to a big database (rather than slow enrichment of custom list)
**The problem:** 
Language diversity is an important dimension of the diversity of datasets. To find one's way around datasets, being able to search by language name and by standardized codes appears crucial.

Currently the list of language codes is [here](https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/blob/main/src/datasets/utils/resources/languages.json), right? At about 1,500 entries, it is roughly at 1/4th of the world's diversity of extant languages. (Probably less, as the list of 1,418 contains variants that are linguistically very close: 108 varieties of English, for instance.)

Looking forward to ever increasing coverage, how will the list of language names and language codes improve over time?
Enrichment of the custom list by HFT contributors (like [here](https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/pull/4880)) has several issues: 
* progress is likely to be slow:
![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6072524/186253353-62f42168-3d31-4105-be1c-5eb1f818d528.png)
(input required from reviewers, etc.)
* the more contributors, the less consistency can be expected among contributions. No need to elaborate on how much confusion is likely to ensue as datasets accumulate.
* there is no information on which language relates with which: no encoding of the special closeness between the languages of the Northwestern Germanic branch (English+Dutch+German etc.), for instance. Information on phylogenetic closeness can be relevant to run experiments on transfer of technology from one language to its close relatives.

**A solution that seems desirable:**
Connecting to an established database that (i) aims at full coverage of the world's languages and (ii) has information on higher-level groupings, alternative names, etc. 
It takes a lot of hard work to do such databases. Two important initiatives are [Ethnologue](https://www.ethnologue.com/) (ISO standard) and [Glottolog](https://glottolog.org/). Both have pros and cons. Glottolog contains references to Ethnologue identifiers, so adopting Glottolog entails getting the advantages of both sets of language codes. 

Both seem technically accessible & 'developer-friendly'. Glottolog has a [GitHub repo](https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog). For Ethnologue, harvesting tools have been devised (see [here](https://github.com/lyy1994/ethnologue); I did not try it out).

In case a conversation with linguists seemed in order here, I'd be happy to participate ('pro bono', of course), & to rustle up more colleagues as useful, to help this useful development happen.
With appreciation of HFT,