In recognition of increased use of Arabic on the web, the first domain names on the Internet using Arabic and not Latin characters have been launched.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have strictly Arabic domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that domain names such as “.com” and “.org” will now be able to use مصر (Egypt), Saudi’s السعودية (AlSaudiah) and Emiratis امارات (Emarat).
“Arabic has now become the first non-Latin script to be used as an internationalized domain name (IDN) and country code top level domain (CCTLD),” a statement from ICANN said.
“Arabic is among the most highly used languages on the Internet today. The Middle-East has an average Internet penetration of just over 20%, and shows a big potential for growth,” said an ICANN statement. “Users in the region will now have easier access to the Internet, with the ability to use their primary language for the entire domain name.”
Saudi Arabian blogger Eman Al Nafjan, told The Media Line that it has been difficult for someone who is not an Arabic speaker to be a blogger. And while she didn’t think it would increase Arabic language blogs initially, the move was bound to increase it in the future.
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“I think it’s a good idea,” Al-Nafjan said. “My blog and the others in English are more about telling the international community about what is happening in the country. But what is more important is the internal discussions which we can only have in our local language.”
The Editor of the Emirati blog grapeshisha.com, told The Media Line that the decision to use Arabic domain names was a sign of greater equality for the Arabic-speaking world.
“It is an important date in the Internet globally as it starts to treat the global audience with some degree of equality,” said the editor, who asked not to be named.
He too did not see an immediate impact on the growth of Internet sites since people who are interested in blogging are already doing so, either in English or Arabic.
“Content sites who want to address a local or language specific audience will eventually shift across, but apart from the land grab of domains there will not be much impact,” said the editor.
Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas was not impressed.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” Abbas said ““I think it’s highly overrated. The focus should be on creating content in Arabic instead.”
Abbas pointed out, for example, a query search in Arabic on the Internet for, say, a medical question, would pull more extensive results in English than in Arabic.
“It will lead to a divided world,” Abbas said “It will created ghettos of English, Arabic or Chinese and it will only be available to people who speak the language and just people who have an Arabic keyboard.”
The popularity of blogging in the Middle East and North Africa was evident on last months Best of Blog (BOB) Awards, the world’s largest international blogging prize presented by the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. Middle East blogs won the popular vote in four of the six main “people’s choice awards.”
According to InternetWorldStats.com 28.8 % of the population in the Middle East have access to internet with the top countries being Israel with 72 %, Bahrain with 55 %, Saudi with 52 percent and Iran with 48 %.
Notably, both Israel and Bahrain have small populations, 7.2 million in Israel and 730,000 in Bahrain, compared to 29 million in Saudi Arabia and 66 million in Iran.