The ICANN85 forum, attended by experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, continues.
During a session of the Domain Name Supporting Organization, Maria Kolesnikova, Coordination Center Chief Analyst, spoke about expanding support for the languages of the peoples of Russia within the Cyrillic domain .РФ.
In 2025, in addition to the Russian alphabet, .РФ added support for 26 characters from the alphabets of 18 official languages of the republics of the Russian Federation. This made it possible to open domain name registrations in the Abaza, Adyghe, Altai, Bashkir, Buryat, Chechen, Chuvash, Ingush, Kabardino-Circassian, Kalmyk, Khakass, Komi, Mari, Ossetian, Tatar, Tuvan, Udmurt, and Yakut languages.
Today, users have already registered approximately 2,000 second-level domains using additional Cyrillic characters. The largest number of registrations are in the Tatar and Bashkir languages, and the most popular characters are ҡ, ү, ӑ, ӗ, and ө.
Maria Kolesnikova stressed that the digitalization of national languages was increasingly expanding across a wide range of areas, from online translators and electronic encyclopedias to language keyboards and neural networks.
“Our project has become part of a larger mosaic of initiatives in Russia aimed at digitalizing the languages of the peoples of Russia. This will expand support for national languages online and make the web more accessible for users who speak their native languages. We also hope that greater attention will be paid to universal acceptance of domain names and email addresses, both by government institutions and the technical community,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
