Arabic domain name

Domain names

After months of preparation, the Egyptian communications ministry has announced the launch of the first internet domain name using Arabic letters. The aim is to try to boost e-services and the number of people online in the country. The domain name .misr, the Arabic word for 'Egypt', which will be spelt in Arabic script, will be registered through internet service suppliers TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar, the ministry said in a statement.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Internationalized Domain Names [IDNs] are domain names represented by local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts, such as Arabic in the case of Egypt, BSN reports.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to 37 characters: the 10 numerals, the hyphen and the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet. In January, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, paved the way for an entire domain name to appear in Cyrillic for Russia and Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Boosting online users

Dr. Tarek Kamel, Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, who made the announcement, said that having Arabic domain addresses "will boost the number of online users in the country and will enable internet services to penetrate new market segments by eliminating language barriers."

Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN said: "The ongoing transition to languages that use alphabets other than Latin-based ones will make the internet more accessible to millions around the globe."

Egypt's IDN ccTLD, along with the Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are the first IDN domains added to the Internet root zone. Kamel boasts that registrations under the new Egyptian domain are the first Arabic domain names on the internet. ICANN has a total of 21 requests representing 11 languages. Until now, only the numerals 0-9, a hyphen, and the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet were allowed in naming conventions. However, Russian Cyrillic will probably be the next character set you'll see, with China in line to launch as well. Chinese presents the more complicated characters to work with because of the variants posed by traditional characters versus the newer simplified characters. Other countries submitting applications are Thailand [Thai] and Sri Lanka [Sinhalese and Tamil].

Jodie Humphries

Jodie Humphries graduated from Bath Spa University with a BA Hons in Creative Writing in 2008. She has worked for GDS Publishing for the digital group since July 2009. She has previous experience with writing for the web, running her own website since April 2007.

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