First Arabic Language Domain Names Go Live, Introducing Non-Latin Characters to the Internet

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.07.2010 at 12:47 pm 6 Comments

Arabic For Internet The Internet's first non-Latin domain names went live this week. via Flickr/ dweekly

The first Arabic Internet addresses went live this week, in the first major change to the domain name system since its creation. Domain names in Arabic were added for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, following final approval by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Visit Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Technology here:
http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/

The change was a long time coming, advocates say. Web sites in Arabic-speaking countries have had to use suffixes like ".com," despite targeting audiences who don't read English or other Latin-script languages. Complicating matters is the fact that Arabic is written from right to left, rather than left to right.

Domain names in Egypt can now include .masr, in Arabic script. Masr is the country's name in Arabic. Egypt will also keep its ".eg" suffix in Latin, the AP reported.

Three companies,TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar, were the first to receive licenses to use the new suffix, AP reported.

A suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is coming soon, too, after ICANN cleared it last month. Proposals for other countries and alphabets have received preliminary approval and should be online by the end of the year, including Chinese in Hong Kong, Thai in Thailand, Silhanese and Tamil in Sri Lanka, and Arabic in several other countries.

About 50 countries expressed interest in creating non-Latin domain names, according to an ICANN survey last year. The Internet overlord started accepting applications for various languages in November, and has since received requests for 11 languages.

[via AP]

Previous Article: Gadgets Timeline: Mobile Augmented-Reality Systems

Next Article: Robots Made Out of Cell Phones Dance, Cry, Throw Tantrums, and Talk to Each Other

6 Comments

Link to this comment

rwidebro

05/07/10 at 1:20 pm

I believe the first sentence should read first non-Latin and not first non-Arabic. Interesting read nonetheless.

Link to this comment

Craigboy

05/07/10 at 3:26 pm

And the internet goes global.

Link to this comment

Jedigeek93

05/08/10 at 8:06 pm

waste of time, most people who use computers use Latin derived languages, except Asia which I'm sure have there own URL's. So doing it for Arabic is pointless

Link to this comment

tundrasea

05/09/10 at 5:01 pm

"Arabic is written from right to left, rather than left to right."

That would be a big advantage for us lefties.

Link to this comment

ford2go

05/10/10 at 2:33 am

No arguement on the fairness of this system. May be a little hard to type in the addresses.

At least some Arabic systems have 'context sensitive' characters. In other words, the character differs depending on the word in which it is used. It takes some fairly sophisticated systems to to enter this type of text. As you complete the word, earlier characters may change because of the context.

It's probably old hat by now, but it took a lot of development to deal with this issue.

Link to this comment

promax

12/14/10 at 7:12 am

very good idea!
if you have any problems, check probicon.de

Popular Tags

Gadgets

Regular Features

The Grouse | Tech's shortcomings exposed

All Tags All Photos All Videos

Gadgets

+ More Photo Galleries

June 2013: American Energy Independence

Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.