electronrun.com

New Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has made the promotion of the Russian language one of his higher priorities and has called for the introduction of Cyrillic domain names. The idea is to make Russian a more international language and break it free from the current 300 million speakers.

On the surface, it sounds like a good move. Unfortunately, the times have changed and the Internet has not got much room for superficial actions. So here is why I think that the type of characters used in domain names is just the tip of the iceberg:

1. A domain name is just a domain name, in other words just a code to find our way to the web page we seek. Once typed and bookmarked, it hardly attracts any further attention. How can that help with the spread of a language?
2. Having to type in names in Cyrillic effectively locks out non-Russian speakers or people that have not got this keyboard choice. How this helps make Russian sites more accessible internationally I honestly do not know…
3. Who is king of the Internet? Content! That’s who it is. Before going on the offensive to further spread a language, there must be enough content for native speakers to cover all their needs so that they do not go further to seek what they want in another language -presumably in English. Building content in Russian is important. Cyrillic domain names aren’t.
4. Russia is attracting criticism on freedom of speech issues. I am in no position to judge how the exact situation is, however in any case freedom of speech is a prerequisite for the stimulation of innovation and the creation of interesting -guess- content!
5. There must be some awfully good reasons for non-Russian speakers to try to learn Russian in order to seek information on Russian sites. Is there anything I can find there that I cannot find in the rest of the web that interests me? This should be the essence of the effort.

So you might ask how I am so sure about all the above. Simple! It has been tried before here in Greece. Domain names with Greek characters were promoted as a major measure to promote the Greek language and alphabet. Since the activation of such domains in July 2005, I have seen very very few sites with such domain names. Have those sites become more attractive since then? For all the above reasons of course not and to be honest the site owners have to register a second domain if they ever want to be exposed outside Greece…

Overall, I feel sad that the Internet is slowly eroding some languages, making world culture poorer by the day. However, now that things start finding a new balance, I believe that there are ways to at least decelerate this trend, something that I would like to discuss in a separate post.

[Reuters]