Issues in IDN

APTLD Meeting in TaipaiFeb. 24, 2003Young-Eum Lee

IDN Status

IETF Standard Approved, prefix decided Some gTLDs and ccTLDs registering sinc

e 2000 Language Groups being formed Actual deployment mainly in Asia

IDN Status

More than 6000 languages About 80 macrolanguages,(+10 million speakers) 12 megalanguages(English, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Span

ish, Portugese, Russian, Bengali, Arabic, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French)

Internet Users: English(58%), Spanish (8.7%), German (8.6%), Japanese (7.9%) and French (3.7%).

Web Pages: English(81%), German (4%), Japanese, French and the Scandinavian languages (2% each) and Spanish (1%). Other languages(8%)

The world speaks 6,700 languages and in thirty-seven states more than fifty languages are spoken. But only a little over 100 languages are official tongues. India has nineteen official languages and South Africa eleven.

IDN Issues

Technical Scripts Case Folding 1:n, n:1, n:n

Policy Registration DRP

Technical

Scripts ACE vs. Unicode

Case Folding ASCII, IDN

1:n, n:1, n:n CJK, TC/SC

Policy

Same Character? Same Script? DRP: international/local Who decides in cases of conflict?

Recommendations

Global focus needed Regional, Language, and individual input

needed ccTLDs need to lead Identify major issues Present recommendations

Technical

Scripts

“LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY: 3,000 LANGUAGES IN DANGER” http://www.unesco.org/bpi/eng/unescopress/2002/02-07e.shtml