Contact:
Mag. My Hue McGowran
Phone: +43-1-81140-308
E-Mail: mcgowran@newsfox.com
| Pressbox | 
|
London (pte026/22.06.2005/12:18) - With about 300 languages spoken in the United Kingdom, a non-profit company called Nominet http://www.nominet.org.uk is lobbying to introduce what they call international domain names - IDNs - to reflect the country's multicultural makeup, and challenge the supremacy of the use of English on the web.
Internet browsers can already read text written in different languages, but until now the website addresses have had to use the the 26-letter Latin alphabet plus hyphens and the digits 0 to 9.
Over four million users are registered with the official domain registry website under .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, .plc.uk, .ltd.uk and .net.uk banners. The company would like to incoporate the use of other languages that use accents or different alphabets, such as Greek or Arabic.
Nominet's head of regulation Edward Phillips explains: "We are asking everyone in the UK what they want. We have Welsh and Gaelic, which require some additional characters, but when you start looking across the country you realise there is a huge range of languages spoken here. Should we open it up to absolutely everybody?
"Given how multicultural the UK is, just saying that we are going to stick with the Latin alphabet is not really a fair way to go about it," Phillips says.
An expert on intercultural studies Professor Susan Bassnett, of the University of Warwick http://www2.warwick.ac.uk thinks that such a move could reflect a growing realisation of multi-ethnic Brits that they have a separate ethnic background.
Also, both Phillips and Bassnett believe that new IDN system could eventually break down the dominance of the English language on the web.
"As English increases its power and more and more people learn it, native English speakers have become less and less interested in learning another language," Bassnett said. "This could be a very positive influence on that trend."
The change would involve an internet browser upgrade in order to recognise website names that use other symbols. Should an address by typed in that doesn't use the 37 core symbols - the Latin 26-letter alphabet, numbers 0 to 9 and hyphens - it would then be converted to a 'plain' domain name, which could be understood by the English language-based fabric of the internet.
The plain names would have the prefix xn--, so www.café.co.uk would become www.xn--caf-fsa.co.uk, which is where the site resides. The browser would link straight to the website without knowing that the address has been translated back into English to find the right location on the web, thus making address such as adiós.co.uk, après-ski.co.uk possible.
(end)
|
|
