Indian Government’s Internet Domains Now Appearing in Hindi: How is This Made Possible?
The internet domains of the Indian Government have now started to appear in Hindi instead of English. These are revealed to be internationalized domain names or IDN, which allows the script to be displayed in Hindi and other languages.
Read more about it below.
How did the Indian Government’s Internet Domains Appear in Hindi?
On visiting any Indian Government website, noticeably one will now be able to find the internet domain being displayed in Hindi language. However, if it is copied and pasted elsewhere, from Hindi it will change to something like this – ‘https://www.xn--i1bj3fqcyde.xn--11b7cb3a6a.xn--h2brj9c/’. For those of you who are wondering what this is, this is what is called an ‘internationalized domain name’ or abbreviated as ‘IDN’. With the help of IDN, other than Latin, it allows the domain name to be displayed in languages like Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, and more, instead of English.
So how does it work? The answer is Punycode Encoding.
The Hindi internet domain name that a visitor of the website sees is actually converted into Punycode. This is a specialized encoding system and using it, the domain name can be made compatible with the traditional ASCII-based Domain Name System or DNS. Also to note, the character ‘xn’ which can be spotted at the beginning of the URL, serves as a marker to indicate that the following text has been encoded in Punycode. The rendering of native scripts like Hindi that is encoded as Punycode, is being decoded by modern browsers into its original script. Thus, visitors of the website will be able to see the actual script in the native language as its internet domain name.
Speaking of an example, the Hindi domain for ‘भारत’ (~ Bharat) in Punycode is written as ‘xn--h2brj9c’. So to conclude, next time when you come across a domain name in Hindi (or maybe any other regional languages), know that it is a Punycode representation of the original domain script.
