2001 until December 2005, the Linguasphere Observatory was actively involved in collaboration with the British Standards Institution BSI Group and with ISO/TC 37in the design and development of a four-letter (alpha-4) code covering—potentially—every recorded language variety in the world. The Observatoire was not, however, associated with or responsible for the final ISO 639-6 standard which was a partial result of this collaboration, approved and published by ISO in 2009. It is the policy of the Observatoire that its on-going independent work on language coding should also be complementary to and supportive of the ISO 639 international standards, The Observatoire expresses its praise and gratitude to the parallel pioneering work of Barbara Grimes, with her husband Joseph, in her position - based in Hawaii until her retirement from 1996 - as the creative Editor of the Summer Institute of Linguistics' Ethnologue: Languages of the World. The Linguasphere Register and Linguascale referential framework The Linguascale framework is a referential system covering all languages, as published in the Linguasphere Register in 2000 and subsequently refined in 2010. It comprises a flexible coding formula which seeks to situate each language and dialect within the totality of the world's living and recorded languages, having regard to ongoing linguistic research. The first part of this linguascale is the decimal classification referred to above, consisting of a linguasphere key of two numerals denoting the relevant phylozone or geozone: from 00. to 99. This provides a systematic numerical key for the initial classification of any of the world's languages, following the principles set out in the Linguasphere Register. The first numeral of the key represents one of the ten referential sectors into which the world's languages are initially divided. The sector can either be a phylosector, in which the constituent languages are considered to be in a diachronic relationship one with another, or a geosector, in which languages are grouped geographically rather than historically. The second numeral is used to represent the ten zones into which each geosector is divided for referential purposes. The component zones, like the sectors, are described as either phylozones or geozones, based on the nature of the relationship among their constituent languages: either historical or geographical. The second part of the linguascale consists of three capital letters (majuscules): from -AAA- to -ZZZ-. Each zone is divided into one or more sets, with each set being represented by the first majuscule of this three-letter