India will soon have domain names in regional languages, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has allocated 7 domain names in the languages Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. And hence, the domain names in these regional Indian languages are expected to go live by the end of this year.
As of now, majority of websites have the URLs which can be written in Latin alphabets, but now you will get to see the URL of websites which can be written in Indian Regional Languages as well. India will be the first country to have the 8 domain name extensions, i.e. 7 in regional languages, and .in. also another very striking feature is, India will be this first country to have Urdu domain names. The domain extensions could be either .in or .bharat (bharat will be written in the respective language. Like for hindi, if you want a website with name as ‘Hindustan.bharat’, it can be –
The agency which is responsible for selling the .in domain names, National Internet Exchange of India, will be selling these regional language domain names.
Once all these regional languages domains are live, the power of web will be easily accessible for the people who somehow are not comfortable with English names. However this only ensures the websites in regional languages, the amount of content available in regional languages will probably still remain an issue. Creating and running a website in regional languages will see limited visitors, Google already suggests not using translation plugins. Let’s wait and watch if the domain names in regional languages can actually revolutionize the web.
Source: Economic Times