3. International Codes

Country Codes are a Fact

Linking with the previous section, you need to know international time before travelling, in order to arrange a trip, or

making international phone calls so as to avoid waking someone up in the middle of the night.

Every country in the world has an international code of their own, assigned and managed by International

Telecommunication Union (ITU), which must be dialed before the national number when making a phone call. The

country dial-in code differs for every nation and it is a small prefix containing one, two or even three digits.

The national number lenght also varies from three up to 17 digits depending on the country.

How is this in practice?

Let's say you are abroad (outside Spain) and you need to dial a Spanish phone number from a local number. In that

case, you should know that the international code for Spain is 34 and that national numbers in Spain have got nine

digits. However, the first thing that you must enter is the plus sign (+) or else 00 before the country code.

There are also many conventions for expressing the phone number, being the most important thing that you separate

these. For example, the complete phone number from abroad for Sergas (Servicio galego de Saúde) would be:

+34 - 981- 952950 or 00 34- 981- 952950

The three digits after doble zero would correspond to the national prefix (981 for A Coruña) and the remaining six

correspond to the national number. We won't delve into national prefixes though.

Today you can make free international codes through your smartphone and apps like Skype, Whatsapp, Face Time,

Line or many others. This is a really useful resource to practice oral English with native speakers. If, on the contrary,

you need to pay for calls, be aware of the fact that there exist international calling cards or SIM cards which allow you

to make much cheaper phone calls.

As we have just seen, the steps to make an international call are:

Here you have a list with all the country codes: International dialing codes.

You will need it for the next activity:

Now that you've guessed the country code for the UK it's time for you to search the international phone number of

the following places within the UK. Carry out your quest through Google and remember to write the complete phone

numbers on your notebook as if you were calling from Spain in order to include all the possible prefixes.

Contact phone nrs.

When you finish, you will check with a partner if you both got the same numbers. To that end, you will do a dictation

in pairs.

Pair dictation

But hold on! It is important to know how to say phone numbers in English.

1) You must say each number one by one and not in pairs, as we may say in Spanish.

2) When there is a number '0' we usually say it as the letter 'o' <oh>.

3) When two equal numbers appear consecutively, we normally say double before the number. Thus, 77 would be

double 7.

4) And if instead of two equal numberds there are three, we say triple before the number.

You will find the KEY to this activity below ⬇.

At this point, what if a foreigner asks you for your phone number? What would you say? Share our answers with the

classroom using a complete sentence: My phone number is ...