Issues in IDN APTLD Meeting in Taipai Feb. 24, 2003 Young-Eum Lee

IDN Status  IETF Standard Approved, prefix decided  Some gTLDs and ccTLDs registering since 2000  Language Groups being formed  Actual deployment mainly in Asia

IDN Status  More than 6000 languages  About 80 macrolanguages,(+10 million speakers)  12 megalanguages(English, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish, Portugese, Russian, Bengali, Arabic, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French)  Internet Users: English(58%), Spanish (8.7%), German (8.6%), Japanese (7.9%) and French (3.7%).  Web Pages: English(81%), German (4%), Japanese, French and the Scandinavian languages (2% each) and Spanish (1%). Other languages(8%)

 The world speaks 6,700 languages and in thirty-seven states more than fifty languages are spoken. But only a little over 100 languages are official tongues. India has nineteen official languages and South Africa eleven.

IDN Issues  Technical Scripts Case Folding 1:n, n:1, n:n  Policy Registration DRP

Technical  Scripts ACE vs. Unicode  Case Folding ASCII, IDN  1:n, n:1, n:n CJK, TC/SC

Policy  Same Character? Same Script?  DRP: international/local  Who decides in cases of conflict?

Recommendations  Global focus needed  Regional, Language, and individual input needed  ccTLDs need to lead  Identify major issues  Present recommendations

Technical  Scripts

 “ LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY: 3,000 LANGUAGES IN DANGER ”