d for three-letter language
identifiers. The standard is based on a convergence of ISO 639-1 (an
earlier standard for two-letter language identifiers adopted in 1988)
and of ANSI Z39.53 (also known as the MARC language codes, a set of
three-letter identifiers developed within the library community and
adopted as an American National Standard in 1987). The ISO 639-2
standard was insufficient for many purposes since it has identifiers
for fewer than 400 individual languages. Thus in 2002, ISO TC37/SC2
formally invited SIL International to prepare a new standard that would
reconcile the complete set of codes used in the Ethnologue with the
codes already in use in the earlier ISO standard. In addition, codes
developed by Linguist List to handle ancient and constructed languages
were to be incorporated. The result, which was officially approved by
the subscribing national standards bodies in 2006 and published in
2007, is a standard named ISO 639-3 that provides standardized three-
letter codes for identifying nearly 7,500 languages (ISO 2007). SIL
International was named as the registration authority for the ISO 639-3
standard inventory of language identifiers and administers the annual
cycle for changes and updates. This edition of Ethnologue is the second
to use the ISO 639-3 language identifiers. In the fifteenth edition
they had the status of Draft International Standard. In this edition
they are based on the standard as originally adopted plus the 2006
series of adopted change requests (released August 2007) and the 2007
series of adopted change requests (released January 2008). Information
about the ISO 639-3 standard and procedures for requesting additions,
deletions, and other modifications to the ISO 639-3 inventory of
identified languages can be found at the ISO 639-3 website:
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3."

= Experiences

Caoimhin O Donnaile has taught computing - through the Gaelic language
- at the Institute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye, in
Scotland. He has also maintained the bilingual (English, Gaelic)
college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on
Scottish Gaelic, as well as the bilingual webpage European Minority
Languages, a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by
language family. He wrote in May 2001: "There has been a great
expansion in the use of information technology in our college. Far more
computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do