The DIN 2335 standard defines a German (two letters long) language code for each language name in ISO 639-1. In some cases when there are more than one German spelling variant for a language name in another language — depending on what kind of transcription or transliteration is used, the standard determines from which variant should the corresponding equivalent be derived. For instance, for the language name 'Swahili' in English:, there are two spelling variants in German: 'Swahili' and 'Suaheli', and in DIN 2335, the german equivalent is 'SW' derived from "Swahili".

The main criterion for the selection of one corresponding language name, is the use of the language name in the German language dictionaries, publications and text corpora.

Such as ISO 639, the DIN 2335 standard is developed to be used for example in applications for terminology, documentation, publication and library. The language codes standardisation is applicable for all working areas, where the indication of languages is important for data exchange between different databases or computerized systems.