The Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF) has been developed by the ISO/TC 37/SC 4/WG 6 since 2011. The first part of the standard is currently at the WD (working draft) stage.

CQLF provides a set of recommendations, which should be considered as guidelines in developing a new query language (QL). CQLF is also helpful to create a new functionality of an existing QL. For example, by using CQLF, a search for relations between annotation layers in multiple annotated linguistic corpora, can be defined for a query language.