Russian Domain Names Now Support National Languages

The .RU and .РФ domain zones have added 25 new characters, enabling web addresses in the alphabets of 17 official languages spoken in Russia’s republics.

Domain registration in Russia’s .RU and .РФ zones now supports characters from the alphabets of 17 official languages used in the country’s republics. Users can now register domain names with letters from languages such as Abaza, Adyghe, Bashkir, Tatar, Chechen, Chuvash, Yakut, and others. In total, 25 new characters have been added, allowing domain names to fully match the orthography and phonetics of these national languages, according to the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.

Experts note that anyone can now create websites with addresses that precisely reflect the pronunciation and spelling of words in their native languages. This includes the ability to register domains that exactly match the traditional writing of place names or cultural terms.

The move is aimed at preserving linguistic diversity in the digital space. Another example of blending national cultures with modern technology is the ongoing effort to train AI systems in the Crimean Tatar language.

These neural networks will generate ready-to-use machine-readable texts in both the target language and Russian, a method expected to improve the quality and speed of translations.