steve, my apologies for taking so long to reply -- I forgot to subscribe to my own thread!

Yeah, I think/hope you are right, then I could enter the really long string (in unicode) in the database. Then, the Cyrillic word, Русский язык, for 'Russian', would render in the drop-down list box.

I've not ever changed the max length allowed for database fields, but I imagine it's pretty easy. I'll look around for the setting.