First website with an Arabic-language domain is launched
In cooperation with the Ministry of Presidential Affairs, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the United Arab Emirates announced the launch of the first website with an Arabic language domain name, خليفة.امارات, the website was launched as the official website of HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE.
According to the Emirates News Agency WAM, خليفة.امارات is the first website with an Arabic domain, however the announcement comes in conjunction with the launch of the official Arabic-domain website of the Telecommunications and Information Technology of Egypt وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر
The new website of the UAE President didn’t open on most of internet browsers like Chrome and FireFox however it worked probably on Internet Explorer, while the Egyptian Ministry’s website worked fine on all browsers.
In addition to the UAE and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Russia were delegated by the ICANN to create non-Latin top domains, these domains are:
السعودية (xn--mgberp4a5d4ar) – the IDN reads al-Saudiah
امارات (xn--mgbaam7a8h) – the IDN reads Emarat
مصر (xn--wgbh1c) – the IDN reads Misr
This initiative is not new, since the beginning of the 21 century an ambitious plan was in place to create an Arabic alternative to the international domains system, like .شركة to replace .com and .شبكة to replace the .net domains, however this idea reached a deadend, until a Memorandum of Understanding between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the UN Economic and Social Commission of Western Asia (UN-ESCWA) was signed in August 2007, bringing the vision of developing Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Arabic to reality.
At the time of signing the MoU, Yousef Nusseir, the UN-ESCWA Chief of Information and Communication Technology Division said that UN-ESCW quoted:
“UN-ESCWA and the League of Arab States are currently harmonizing several regional joint activities, among which is the upgrade of the Arab pilot project spearheaded by the League, aiming at full-fledged implementation that would drastically increase the internet dissemination rates in the region.”
The Arabic language has its unique features, and these features can lead to some obstacles, for example most of Arabic characters connect to each other from both sides, which can mix different words to read as an undefined word, this issue can be tackled by using the “-”, but this will be impractical in the case of domains that consist of more than 2 words.
Among obstacles that might face Arabic domains is the variations of the way some characters are written, like the first letter in the Arabic alphabet “ا” which can be written as “أ” or “إ” or “آ”. In addition some characters might cause some confusion like “ـة” and “ـه”, “ى” and “ي”, and “ئ” and “ؤ” and “ء”, not to mention the punctuation and diacritic, which can change the entire meaning of the sentence.
In a survey that was conducted 8 years ago by Dr. Abdul Aziz Zoman, head of the Saudi Network Information Center, 58.1% of respondents believe that similar characters shouldn’t be unified, 36.3% believe it should be unified.
Some of the suggested Arabic letters/words back in 2002
One of the obstacles that Dr. Zoman highlighted in his research is the number zero, which is represented in Arabic using the dot “.”, an integral part of the structure of a domain name.
One of challenges that might also face this initiative is the accent used, each Arab country has an accent of its own, these accents are very similar in some regions like GGC, Levant and North Africa, in addition to the formal Arabic accent, which will create some confusion if the domain is written in Egyptian accent or Khaliji, but on the other hand it could open a world of opportunities for site owners.
