Now, domain names in Gurmukhi

Ravneet Singh
Tribune News Service

Patiala, March 3

In a step to promote Punjabi language, a team from Punjabi University has developed label generation rules for validating international domain names in Gurmukhi. With this, people will be able to create websites with web addresses and email identities in Gurmukhi.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, responsible for the management and coordination of website addresses across the world has recognised the contribution of Dr Gurpreet Singh Lehal of Punjabi University and his team in making the Internet multilingual.

Dr Gurpreet Singh Lehal, director, Research Centre for Punjabi Language Technology, said Gurmukhi was now one among 16 scripts worldwide, including Tamil, Ethiopic, Georgian, Lao, Thai, Devanagari, Gujarati, Hebrew, Arabic and others, in which top-level domain names could be created. He said, “Some of the more popular scripts, including Bangla, Cyrillic, Han, Hangul, Hiragana and Katakana, still do not have the option of having top-level domain names in their scripts. This will benefit Punjabis worldwide in creating websites in Gurmukhi and lead to further internationalisation of the language. More so, people will be able to purchase and use any top-level domain names, including ‘.punjab’ and ‘.uk’ which were not available earlier.”

Following this, Punjabi University has also decided to create a website with a domain name in Gurmukhi.

Vice-Chancellor Dr BS Ghuman said, “This will break the language barrier for people who can only read or write in Punjabi. The university website address will soon be available in Gurmukhi also.”

Other top-level domain names include .com, .net and .org on the Internet.