06.05.2024

Domain name in Armenian ․հայ

Domain name in Armenian ․հայ

Using the national alphabet when querying the Website seems to be a natural right for a native speaker.
Without the development of additional tools, English-speaking users have this opportunity, because The DNS system operates with a limited set of characters - 26 capital and capital Latin letters, numbers 0-9 and a hyphen between characters.

The issue of developing additional means for using non-Latin characters for addressing on the Internet - Internationalized Domain Name - was raised in the IETF community https://www.ietf.org in December 1996.

A separate task is to create the possibility of using the national alphabet in E-mail Addressing Internationalization (EAI) email addresses. Without solving this problem, the Website will contain only Latin letters in the email address required for feedback.

In Armenia, the Internet Society registered the IDN domain .հայ in 2014, registration is available today on the page https://internet.am/en/domain-registration . Using the .հայ domain allows you to call things by their proper names, without the distortion of sounds inherent in transliteration into Latin.

Using the Armenian script on computers is impossible, so developers use a method of unambiguously translating domain names in the .հայ zone into the Latin alphabet. You can see what happens: type https://internet.am, select “punicode converter” at the bottom of the page and you can translate any word in Armenian into punicode. Modern browsers understand punicode and display the correct expression in Armenian in the search bar.

The promotion of IDN and EAI is carried out by most of the world's Internet giants and ICANN https://www.icann.org/ua ; in search queries using the national script, sites with IDN names are first returned. But you need to keep in mind that email using national scripts may not work reliably, not all mail servers support EAI.

The cost of registering a domain in the .հայ zone is significantly lower, which should also contribute to the promotion of domains using the Armenian script. Don’t forget that և is not among the allowed characters when registering domains in Armenian; instead of և you need to use եւ:

Registration of domains in the .հայ zone contributes to the preservation of national cultural heritage and national identification, so we encourage you to register domains in the .հայ zone.

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