Bangladesh applies for an IDN

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Seventeen countries have applied for IDNs so far, but we only know the details on four of them:

  • Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
  • Egypt (EG): مصر
  • United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
  • Russian Federation (RU): рф

Yesterday, Bangladesh announced that it too had applied. Here is the domain the government selected:

  • বাংলা

There are 300 million Bangla speakers around the world who will potentially benefit from this domain.

To be clear, this domain has not yet received string approval from ICANN (the first four domains have been approved).

Here is the article that shows the prime minister of Bangladesh filing the application online. Yes, online, and no doubt after typing in an ASCII URL.

A year from now there will be full-length Bangla URLs.

This is getting interesting!

PS: If you’re seeing empty boxes above instead of Bangla characters, you don’t have the necessary font installed. This is one of the glaring differences between Windows and Mac. Below is a screen grab that shows Firefox on Mac on the left and IE8 on Windows 7 on the right.

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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