The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA.), the organization that manages the .CA Internet domain, now supports the use of all French characters in .CA domain names, allowing Canadians to register their .CAs correctly in both official languages for the first time”.
“Previously, the only characters that could be used in a .CA domain name were the letters a-z, the numbers 0-9 and hyphens.”
“When a domain name works with any characters beyond these, it’s called an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN)”.
“It is now possible for French .CA domain names to be spelled with the language’s full range of characters and ligatures: é, ë, ê, è, â, à, æ, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ç, î, ï, ÿ”.
“This is great news for all Canadians because it means they can now use the .CA domain in Canada’s two official languages, French and English,” said Byron Holland, President and CEO of CIRA. “This is also great news for owners of .CA domains and their website visitors because it means that domain names can precisely match names, businesses and trademarks.”
Also as of today Go Daddy.com the world’s largest registrar, is supporting French IDN.CA domain names or French accented characters.
“With nearly 7 million French speaking people in Canada, Go Daddy gives customers the ability to claim their nationality online in their language.
Now French-Canadian businesses and individuals have the opportunity to grow their Canadian brand with a domain in more than one language with characters like â, é, î, ô, and ù. For instance, a customer would be able to register grace.ca and grâce.ca, with exclusive rights to all variants of the domain name.
Go Daddy launched .CA names in 2008 and began accepting Canadian dollars in 2011.”
“For more information about the rollout of French-language characters for the .CA domain, please visit http://cira.ca/why-ca/french-ca“.
CIRA is kicking off the launch of French-language domain names at a networking event tomorrow night in Montreal at the Hôtel Place d’Armes, 55, rue Saint-Jacques West. For more information, please visit http://www.cira.ca/membership/memberevents/.
As a Canadian, I think this is a good thing. Although, the best .ca french generics have already been regged without the accents long ago. Now those holders have the choice to create the IDN version of each domain, or not. I’ll be doing that to a few of mine, where I want to build second sites for them, and test them out. It is natural for French people to type the words correctly with accents, it only makes sense. Mobile use is increasing rapidly, and smartphones and tablets make it super easy to type IDN characters now.