Arabic translation for iPhone

Question

What localization prefix do I use for an Arabic translation of the text for an iPhone application? For example for a French translation I use the prefix "fr" which creates a directory "fr.lproj". In actuality the lproj prefixes are the two letter country codes for the country. But there isn't a country for Arabic. So what localization prefix do I use for an Arabic translation?

Answer 1

I don't know about the iPhone specifically, but for Arabic it is typical to use "ar" as the prefix. If there are specific subsets, it has the form of "ar-XXX" but don't know what the possible XXXs are.

Generally, it is good to follow one of the ISO standards, I am guessing that if you use fr then you need ISO 639-1 and not 639-2. See this link.

Answer 2

BCP 47 definition for Arabic:

Type: language
Subtag: ar
Description: Arabic
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Arab
Scope: macrolanguage

Also here's a list of the Languages abbreviations in ISO 639-2 format: ISO 639-2 language codes
I hope it helps.