There is no need for a language to be "special" just to get standardized.

The main driver is a group of people willing to submit the necessary documents to ISO (or national bodies like ANSI or DIN or even IEEE, and then ISO may also adopt existing standards as theirs).

COBOL, FORTRAN and Pascal are all ISO Standards [1,2,3].

[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/74527.html

[2] https://www.iso.org/standard/82170.html

[3] https://www.iso.org/standard/13802.html