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One year anniversary .eu IDNs

10 Dec. 2010

Brussels, 10 December 2010 – Marking the first anniversary of the introduction of .eu Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), EURid, the .eu top-level domain registry, reveals that ‘ü’ is the most used character in .eu IDNs, along with other script and alphabet usage trends.

During the past year, 90.4% of .eu IDNs included accented Latin characters, followed by Greek (5.0%) and Cyrillic (4.5%). The three most popular letters in .eu IDNs are all from the Latin script: ‘ü’ (19.4%), ‘ä’ (18.4%) and ‘ö’ (14.4%). The most used Greek character is ‘α’ and the most popular letter from the Cyrillic alphabet is ‘а’.

EURid has offered .eu domain names in the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts since 10 December 2009. Following the initial landrush and one year of steady growth, IDNs make up 2.1% of the .eu portfolio.

“Going from zero to over 68 000 .eu IDNs within a year shows that EU residents are starting to use their own languages online. The growth of .eu IDNs during 2010 is in line with our expectations,” said Marc Van Wesemael, General Manager of EURid.

Germany has the majority of .eu IDNs (46.0%) followed by the Czech Republic (14.6%) and Poland (5.1%). Spain accounts for 2.6% of .eu IDNs, where ‘ñ’ is the most used character.

Among .eu accredited registrars, 41.9% have registered at least one .eu IDN. German registrars manage 40.2% of all .eu IDNs, followed by the Czech Republic (12.9%) and Austria (7.9%).

“Our clients are from all over Europe and want to register domain names in their own alphabets, which can be non-Latin, for example Greek or Bulgarian. As a domain name specialist, we also serve international companies that would like to communicate with their clients in their local languages,” said Laurent Callens, Customer Service Executive at Register SA, a Belgian registrar.

"We are very glad that we can offer our customers registration of full-value .eu domain names in the national language. We understand that this is a natural development for Internet domains, which enables business people to exactly express their products and services," said Ing. Petr Komárek, Director of the Internet department at the Czech registrar ZONER Software, a.s.

Steady growth of .eu IDNs during 2010

Internationalised Domain Names are particularly important for .eu as the EU has 27 Member States and 23 official languages, many of which use accented Latin characters and the Bulgarian and Greek alphabets as a whole. For more information about .eu IDNs, including a list of supported characters and technical limitations, please visit: our IDNs page.