Bangladesh formally applies for IDN

Dhaka Feb 21 (bdnews24.com) — Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has filed a formal application to the global internet body to include Bangla in Country Code Top Level Domain or ccTLD for a greater recognition of the language in the world community.

Watched by a minister and senior civil servants at her Hare Road home on Sunday, Hasina went online to file the application on behalf of Bangladesh.

For 300 million Bangla-speaking people in the world — more than half in Bangladesh — this will facilitate web browsing in their mother tongue, the BTRC said in a statement.

The bid, which may take 6-9 months to materialise, was launched exactly 58 years after students laid down their lives on the streets of Dhaka to retain their rights to speak Bangla as state language.

The government decided to use ‘.বাংলা’ as primary string and ‘.বাংলাদেশ’, ‘.বং’, ‘.বঙ্গ’, ‘.বিডি’ as variant strings.

So far, 17 countries have applied to ICANN, the global custodian for domain names and systems, with Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and UAE getting their applications approved on Jan 21.

“This will help expedite the inclusion of Bangla as one of the official languages of the UN,” the BTRC said.

Officials say Bangla domain names will also make search engines more efficient for content in the language.

They say getting domain names of choice will be a lot easier and that protection of content copyright for local websites will be possible.

Click here for the story in Bangla

Source: http://bdnews24.com


Leave a Reply