Place the Accent on Multilingual

The French word hфtel, appears on around 700,000 Web pages, according to the Google search engine.

So what sort of Web site do you think hфtel.com is? You might assume its a place for French tourists to book hotel accommodation. But you would be wrong.

Hфtel.com doesnt exist. Why? Are the French way behind the times? Not a bit. Rather, its the infrastructure of the Internet that has failed to keep up with the explosion in global Internet use.

Name That Domain in 1 Language
Let me explain. Until recently, domain names were restricted to the English alphabet. To be more precise, domain names could only contain the characters A through Z, numerals 0 through 9 and the dash. Although hфtel appears on thousands of Web pages, it couldnt appear in a domain name.

On Nov. 10, 2000, something historic happened. The first non-English domain names became available for registration. Specifically, people were given the chance to register names in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

On Feb. 26, 2001, characters in many other languages became available for the first time. This allowed for names in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Arabic and Russian.

Of course, non-English words containing only English language characters were already available for registration. For example, the French word allez was registered as allez.com; the German word deutschland appeared at deutschland.com.

Accents, Tildes and Cedillas
But that left thousands of accented words unavailable for registration. Until now. And for languages with different alphabets, Arabic and Russian for example, the entire domain name space only recently opened.

Does all this matter? Isnt English the lingua franca on the Net? Does anybody want these new multilingual domain names?

It comes as a surprise to many native English speakers that the majority of the worlds population doesnt speak English as a first language.

When given the opportunity, nonnative English speakers choose to use their native languages when surfing the Web. If they want to read Web pages in their languages, it makes sense they want the same in domain names.

Dont Look Now ...
So the domain-name space has opened and people from all over the world can register domain names in their native languages. Thats great. But where are all the Web sites in this brave new, multilingual world?

The rather shocking news is there arent any.

While great progress is being made with domain-name registration technologies, DNS servers, the servers that do the hard work of translating domain names into numeric IP addresses, are still unable to cope with multilingual domain names.

So it looks like its going to be a good while before the French can do their Christmas shopping at Noлl.com or the Spanish can watch TV at televisiуn.com.

But it will happen. And when it does, the Internet will have taken another step on its frantic journey to maturity.

About the author

Lee Hodgson is founder and owner of DomainGuideBook.com domainguidebook.com, a firm which specializes in helping small businesses choose and register the best domain names for their web sites.

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