The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) is marking its 20th anniversary. In this connection, CENTR has published a series of articles on the role of national domains in the global network. One of these articles includes the results of the research carried by Oxford Information Labs on CENTR’s request. The research is of particular interest and dedicated to linguistic diversity of the internet content in national domains.
English is traditionally believed to be the language of the internet. And this is true, considering that there are over 6,000 languages in the world, and about 54 percent of all existing web pages are in English. However, the analysis of the content in national domains shows a different picture. Oxford Information Labs analyzed the content of websites associated with 16.4 million domain names in national domains. They chose nine national domains governed by registries, which are either CENTR members or associate members, including .RU and .РФ.
During the analysis, the experts identified the language the website content was written in and also identified potentially irrelevant websites (such as those with only one page) and parked domains. The final result showed that only 19 percent of all the content in the analyzed national domains was created in English, while about 76 percent is in the language of the country the national domain belongs to. The share of content written in a national language in internationalized domains was at least 84 percent (over 90 percent in .РФ).
In conclusion, the experts say national domains make an invaluable contribution to the development of the linguistic diversity of the internet as its main foundation.
