Language identification is probably the most fundamental kind of information that can be given to any language resource [Simons2000]. The most comprehensive knowledge base for language identification is the Ethnologue [Grimes2000], an online searchable database which has been built up over fifty years. The Ethnologue database contains several types of information for each language: a unique three-letter code, the country where this language is spoken, alternative names, dialects, language classification, comments, and references to the SIL bibliography. This section discusses a variety of issues relating to language identification and to the specification of the languages covered by multilingual resources. We believe these are two key issues for the Asian language resources community.