Dot Bharat In Different Tongues: Addresses of Websites Getting Multilingual

Dot Bharat In Different Tongues: Addresses of Websites Getting Multilingual

Indian website owners will now be able to go multilingual when it comes to web addresses. Users will now be allowed to type in addresses into the web browser using Devnagri. For users, “dot bharat” is the “in” thing if you are online. The new service is all set to roll-out on the 21st of August this year. The “sunrise period” for people with registered trademarks will be 90 days wherein peple will be able to register names in languages using Devnagri script including Hindi, Boro, Marathi and Dogri.

This is a a very positive sign for the further development of national language Hindi as well as regional languages. Considering that China which is the world leader in web technology allows domain names in Mandarin, India too should provide its citizens with such facilities for Hindi as well as regional languages.

At the end of the 90 day period, all regular users of the net will also be able to access this service. This is a major plus as it can attract users and people who want to access domain names in their mother tongues in Devnagri script. The organisation behind this initiative is the National Internet Exchange of India. This is an autonomous, non-profit organisation which offers support for peering of ISPs and routing domestic traffic within the nation.

This initiative is the result of a collaboration between this organisation and Indian government's C-DAC ( Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) who have partnered to develop this country code top level domain (ccTLD) of dot bharat.

Mahesh Kulkarni who is the program coordinator at C-DAC and heads the language technology group there has been quoted as saying "Once the sunrise period runs smoothly, we will introduce other languages in other scripts such as Bengali, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu etc. There is no timeline set for it yet, but we hope there will be enough pressure with the adoption of the Devnagri domains to implement it soon.”

In more positive moves, the Union Minister of Communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad has indicated that certain government websites will also be part of the launch next week."For example, the pmindia dot gov dot in will be pradhanmantri dot sarkar dot bharat," Dr Govind , CEO of NIXI has been quoted as saying. Considering that all regional languages as well as national language Hindi deserve to be developed further, this initiative will go a long way in promoting their identity and value.

English is an important language and Indians owe a lot of their success to it, but Hindi as well as regional languages should not get left behind either. URLs in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi and other languages of our nation will encourage the growth of Hindi as well as regional language media and portals online.

Sahitya Akademi-winning Hindi writer Uday Prakash has been quoted on Firstpost as emphasising that quality content in regional languages should be made available online. “It’s a good step and will help those who are not comfortable with English. However, the problem remains that most of the content online is in English. If I search for Robin Williams in English, I will find hundreds of webpages. But if I google the same name in Devnagri, I’ll hardly find anything,” Prakash has been quoted as saying by Firstpost. W

hile this is right, care should also be taken that the cultural relevance of the information is taken into account. A person living in Mirzapur may never even have heard of late US actor Robin Williams and would probably never google the same in Hindi or any other regional language.