the roll out of Domain Names in Indian languages by June 2010

[phio]

http://www.newkerala.com/nkfullnews-1-159560.html

"Over three years, out of 22 scheduled Indian languages, work on 14 major languages has been completed. The remaining eight languages would be taken up soon."

Looks like someone's been gearing up for this...

[bwhhisc]

Nice article...and a huge population market.
I hope you post this up over at NP as well.

[555]

Another one:

www.internet.com in Telugu! Coming soon

HYDERABAD: The Internet has just celebrated its 40th anniversary, and though it has reached a worldwide audience since its inception, it remains a predominantly English medium. A majority of Internet websites are exclusively in English, and most domain names (the names one types into their browser’s address bar) are in English as well. To remedy this fact and to make the Internet more international in its reach, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has partnered with the Indian Government’s Department of Information Technology. Together, they aim to develop fonts for each of India’s 22 official languages.

Dr. Sarat Chandra Babu remarked, “Only 10 per cent of Indians are fluent in English, so it is important that we be able to browse the Internet in India’s home languages.” CDAC has been instrumental in developing local language fonts, and now offers fonts in Devanagari, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Oriya, Punjabi, and many other scripts.

Talika Pandey, a director at DIT Delhi explained, “You can have a domain name in your own language.

ICANN [The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers] is now ready for web addresses with non-Latin script, and it is important we take advantage of this.” China, Japan, Korea, and Arabic all have non-Latin domain presence, which means that web addresses do not have to be typed in English, but can be directly entered in those countries’ home language. “64 per cent of internet users are non-English speakers, yet they must use English to access web sites,” said Pandey, “Asia leads the world in number of Internet users, and India alone has over 81 million of its citizens on the Internet.” One major difficulty has arisen from similar-looking characters in different scripts. For instance, many letters in Tamil bear a strong resemblance to letters in Devanagari, which could be confusing to users.

However, as Pandey mentioned, the greatest problem is from a lack of community participation, of which she said there is ‘almost none’. “We need all your help in bringing this idea to fruition,” she said, “This is something that will benefit all of us.”

http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=www.internet.com+in+Telugu!+Coming+soon&artid=4SVXLDfGWCw=&SectionID=xAV59odivTs=&MainSectionID=xAV59odivTs=&SEO=&SectionName=BUzPVSKuYv7MFxnS0yZ7ng==

[Rubber Duck]

Na, never happen. Rick told me they all speak English. :rolleyes:

[phio]

“Only 10 per cent of Indians are fluent in English, so it is important that we be able to browse the Internet in India’s home languages.”

Fluent not equal to "read and write" Most taxi drivers in India are probably fluent in English. So, fluent, and able to read and write is probably around 7 or 8 percent. Just a guess. ;)

[Rubber Duck]

Fluent not equal to "read and write" Most taxi drivers in India are probably fluent in English. So, fluent, and able to read and write is probably around 7 or 8 percent. Just a guess. ;)

Well, that is already better than Bradford. Most of them here only speak Urdu! Actually probably more accurately they write Urdu, but speak Punjabi.