In 2019, CENTR is celebrating its 20th anniversary and publishing a series of articles exploring the role and place of ccTLDs in the global network.
Recently, we wrote about an article devoted to the results of a study carried out by Oxford Information Labs at CENTR’s request. The article, “Diversity through localization: How ccTLDs enhance linguistic diversity online,” was translated into Russian by request of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and is available to anyone interested in the linguistic diversity of internet content in national domains. The Russian-language version of the article can be found on the Coordination Center’s website.
Researchers selected for analysis nine ccTLDs managed by registries that are members or associate members of CENTR. These included .RU and .РФ.
The study showed that only 9 percent of content in .RU and 8 percent in .РФ are in the English language. The big surprise was that the third most used language in the Russian ccTLDs .RU and .РФ - after Russian and English - is Bulgarian. However, it makes up an extremely small share - less than 2 percent for .RU and less than 1 percent for .РФ. In general, the study showed that country-code top-level domains primarily represent their country and its language on the internet.
You can read the article “Diversity through localization: How ccTLDs enhance linguistic diversity online” in Russian on the Coordination Center’s website.
