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Domain name otepäälasteaed.ee becomes 1,000th registered domain name with diacritics

Today, almost 6 months after registration of domain names containing letters with diacritical marks became available, otepäälasteaed.ee has become the 1,000th registered .ee domain name with diacritics, with the total number of registered .ee domains surpassing 65,000. The procedure for registration of domain names with diacritics was introduced on 13 June, 2011.

From 13 June this year you can register .ee domain names containing letters with diacritical marks (ä, ö, ü, õ, š and ž), thus the whole Estonian alphabet is now covered.

“Just 6 months after the introduction of the procedure for registration of domain names containing letters with diacritical marks we have 1,000 such domain names, which is approximately 1.5% of the total number of .ee domains. Our Northern neighbour Finland introduced the IDN (Internationalised domain names) system back in 2005. As of September 2011, of the total number of 273,000 domains names registered in that country, 2.5% were domains with diacritics,” noted Marek-Andres Kauts, Chairman of the Management Board of the Estonian Internet Foundation. “We can thus already conclude that the total Estonian alphabet coverage for .ee domains names is a well-received measure. The number of domain names with diacritics is stably increasing. This tendency would become more pronounced if support for addresses containing diacritics were integrated into the popular e-mail programmes,” Kauts added.

Marju Ilistom, who registered otepäälasteaed.ee, the 1,000th domain name with diacritics, says that registration of such domain names facilitates making them truly national: “We wanted something genuinely Estonian – and we got it”.