Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Right of the colon? IDN getting killed over dot confusion

Kevin Murphy, February 11, 2019, 13:01:28 (UTC), Domain Registries

An internationalized domain name ccTLD is reportedly getting buried because of a confusion about how many dots should appear.
Armenia’s .Õ°Õ¡Õµ (.xn--y9a3aq) today has fewer than 300 registered domains, well under 1% of the volume enjoyed by the Latin-script .am, apparently due to a unique quirk of the Armenian language.
According to a report in the local tech press, sourcing a registry VP, .Õ°Õ¡Õµ domains are not working because of how the Armenian script uses punctuation.
In Armenian, a full-stop or period is represented by two vertically aligned dots called a verjaket that looks pretty much identical to a colon in English and other Latin-based languages.
A single dot, looking and positioned exactly like a Latin period, is called a mijaket and is used in the same way English and other languages use a colon.
It’s not entirely clear whether the problem lies with the user, the keyboards, the browsers, or elsewhere, but it’s plain to see how confusion could arise when you have Armenian-script characters on both sides of a Latin-script dot.
The registry, ISOC Armenia, is today reporting just 298 .Õ°Õ¡Õµ domains, compared to 34,354 .am domains.
The Latin-script ccTLD has benefited in the past from its association elsewhere with AM radio. It’s also sometimes used as a domain hack, including by Instagram’s URL shortener.
It’s probably worth noting that while Armenia seems to have a unique problem, it’s far from unusual for an IDN ccTLD to perform poorly against its Latin stablemate.
.Õ°Õ¡Õµ, which transliterates to “.hay”, is an abbreviation of the Armenian name for Armenia, Õ€Õ¡ÕµÕ¡Õ½Õ¿Õ¡Õ¶ or “Hayastan”. It was delegated by ICANN in 2015 as part of its IDN ccTLD fast-track program.
Armenian has fewer than seven million speakers worldwide. Armenia has roughly three million inhabitants.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Add Your Comment