The US government has allowed the use of other alphabets to define and write domain names on the internet. Instead of the plain latin alphabet, we can now use arabic and cyrillic (used in Russian) to write internet addresses. Where does this leads to ?
It looks strange at first, but when you think about it, it makes sense. There are 1.6 billion internet users today, but more than half of them are using languages with different alphabets. Considering the wish to have the internet reach the whole world population, it will hit more and more people understanding only their mother language (and associated alphabet). These people will be glad to have the possibility to use the internet in their native language, and that is excellent.
But it confronts us with the reverse : we cannot read their addresses anymore, unless we understand their languages and alphabets. It demonstrates the limits of humanity : we cannot know all the languages (at least not in 1 head), and we will probably never move to one single language. In fact this new possibility will reinforce the co-existence of different linguistic systems.
On the other hand it will promote online translation systems, translating addresses from one language into the other. Another side effect is security. What if we get an email with an invitation to click on an addresses we cannot understand anymore ? For companies who want to reach these communities, they will have to create their websites and have the corresponding addresses in these language.
I wonder how Google looks like in arabic and cyrillic :-).
Most Comments