India to have SIXTEEN ccTLDs
While most countries are content to operate using a single ccTLD, India is to up its count to an unprecedented 16.
It already has eight, but ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend approved the delegation of an additional eight.
The new ccTLDs, which have yet to hit the root, are .ಭಾರತ, .ഭാരതം, .ভাৰত, .ଭାରତ, .بارت, .भारतम्, .भारोत, and .ڀارت.
If Google Translate and Wikipedia can be trusted, these words all mean “India” in, respectively, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Odia, Arabic, Nepali, Hindi and Sindhi.
They were all approved under ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track program and will not operate under ICANN contract.
India already has seven internationalized domain name versions of its ccTLD in seven other scripts, along with its vanilla ASCII .in.
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will be ccTLD manager for the whole lot.
India may have as many as 122 languages, according to Wikipedia, with 30 spoken by more than a million people.
It is “Bharat”. All of those. Another word for “India”.
Or Indian registrants could just use .desi…
You’d think that, with only 2 million or so registered names on the English script, there were enough names available for nearly everyone. Unless there’s a grand plan (conspiracy?) to make IDNs the way of the future, I don’t see how this helps anyone.
More and more people are speaking English now…so good luck with that!!!
The Arabic and Sindhi ones are misspelled:
https://www.google.com/search?q=bharat+in+arabic
As I have no knowledge of either of these scripts I cannot confirm or deny that. I simply copied them from ICANN’s board resolution. I expect they’re correctly spelled in the DNS.