Every language has its linguistic differences. Like most European languages, Catalan has several special characters such as accents and the dieresis, and others such as the Ç and the interpunct.

We use these in writing, yet these characters can’t initially be used when registering a domain name or an email address. This means that we find examples such as a website for a calçotada becomes a calcotada, or a company advertising decoració uses the word decoracio, without the special character.

This does not happen with the .barcelona domain, as it accepts a long list of special characters. The name of your .barcelona domain can therefore be written just as it is with your project, meaning people can find you writing the right name and that it doesn’t appear strange to read. Examples here might include registering domains with names such as ràdio.barcelona, habitació.barcelona or abraçada.barcelona.

IDN and ASCII

Domain names which include special characters are called Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). They include characters outside the standard range for the exchange of information, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), which is the language used by the internet. As ASCII does not include accents or other characters from Arabic, Slavic, Asian or other languages, excluding a huge part of the world’s population, the need arose for internet addresses to be able to ‘speak’ in the way that their users do. The inclusion of these characters was proposed in 1998, but it wasn’t until 2005 that they were publicly presented by the ICANN.

The new characters have not actually been added to ASCII code, which the network continues to function with, but rather an algorithm transforms the IDN characters into ASCII. That’s why when we register a domain name with accents and special characters, we are also registering another at the same time with the standards for ASCII code.

Either way, IDN gives us more flexibility and freedom when it comes to choosing our .barcelona domain, meaning we can write using the characters of our language and in turn show the value of our identity.

To register a .barcelona domain with special characters, the holder must contact their registration company to request it. The registration company must do this at no charge, as it forms part of the particular characteristics of this domain.