* Thanks to Jarmo Wegelius for comments to an earlier draft to this paper, and to Juhani Lehtiranta, Michael Everson, Karl Ivar Larsson and the members of the committee for standardisation of Sámi characters (Roy Amundsen, Edmund Grønmo, Audun Lona, and Hannu Kangasniemi) for inspiring discussions on this subject. Thanks also to Bjørnhild Sætherøy, who has provided me with the relevant documentation on the ISO standards.

1 Karelian, Vepsian and Komi are also used in the region. They will not be included in the discussion to follow, but the solutions to be proposed for the different Sámi languages can in principle also be extended to Karelian. Vepsian and Komi.

2 All ISO/IEC code tables in this article are shown using Everson Mono Fonts (http://www.indigo.ie/egt/everson-mono.html). KOI8 was shown using a shareware KOI8 font found at http://www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/rus/russian.html. The Kildin Sámi graphemes are designed by Juhani Lehtiranta (JL-Types).

3 If two computers use distinct code tables, they can still communicate, provided there is a process that takes one code table as its input and translates it into anoter one (metaphorically speaking, by moving the letters around on the table). This is done as a routine on most web and mail programs, but clearly the preferred state of affairs is the one where the same code table is used from the very beginning.

4 Consisting of Roy Amundsen, Edmund Grønmo, Audun Lona, Hannu Kangasniemi and Trond Trosterud.

5 The columns 8 and 9 are filled according to common Windows practice, although they are not a part of the 8859 standard series proper.