Getting an Internet domain name in English is now old, get ready to have it in your own regional language.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit corporation which holds the responsibility for Internet’s Domain Name System management, is currently working to support domain names in numerous languages spoken in India, including the 22 scheduled languages of the nation.
“Work is on for nine Indian scripts – Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. These scripts are expected to cover many different local languages,” ICANN India head Samiran Gupta.
ICANN has been working towards building the rules domains in scripts used globally, so that people with no knowledge of English are able to go online and access the websites completely in their languages.
For example, one can enter the website name in Hindi to get Hindi content, instead of typing in English for this purpose, which is the current practice.
About 52 per cent of the world population have access to Internet now and ICANN is contributing towards bridging the digital divide, he said. “Many of the remaining 48 per cent are non-English speaking people and those who do not have the ability to type in English. The work will allow domain names to be available for these people in their languages,” the ICANN India head said.
When asked that searching content in regional languages is already possible in Google and other search engines, he said the current effort is focused on enabling the domain names in regional languages, which in turn would enable the system to publish local language content being searched.
