There is a saying in Serbian that “You are worth the number of languages you speak”. As of 10th December our .RS domain will “speak” no less than 13 languages, supporting the specific letters of their official scripts. In addition to Serbian letters, .RS domain names will support characters from the Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Romany, Slovak, Slovene and Vlach languages. In doing so our .RS domain joins the great global family of IDN domains, which currently comprise around 7.5 million registered IDNs.
Domain names comprising any letter not contained within the English alphabet (i.e. in the ASCII character set) are referred to as IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names), and the initial registration period for IDNs will begin within the .RS domain on 10/12/2018 at 12 noon.
There is a global commitment to multilinguality on the Internet. The concept of IDNs first emerged online in 1996, and in 2000 registration of IDNs was enabled within the .COM and .NET domains. Only a year later, ccTLDs began registrations of IDNs, among the first of which was the Japanese .JP domain. In 2003, ICANN, the organisation that manages the global structure of the Internet, approved the IDN standard, and the same year, at the 32nd session of the General Conference of UNESCO in Paris, a recommendation was passed which among other things advocated the promotion and equal use of different languages and scripts on the Internet. In 2003 the first European national registries – the Polish and the Swedish – began registering IDNs. In 2004 they were followed by the Austrian, Swiss, German, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian and Norwegian registries. Thus the Internet entered a new multilingual era.
Every nation aspires to use its own script on the Internet, not just within content but also within its domain names. RNIDS has kept up with global trends, in 2012 facilitating registrations of Cyrillic domains within the .СРБ domain. Now the .RS domain will be opened up to the broader range of Latin characters used in the Republic of Serbia.
During the initial registration period, only registrants of existing .RS domains will be allowed to register IDNs. They will be able to register new IDN .RS domains which have a corresponding, previously unavailable IDN character in place of an ASCII character (for example “č” or “ć” instead of “c”, “š” instead of “s” etc.). Additionally, all those registering a new .RS domain during this period will have the right to register a corresponding .RS IDN. Whether the .RS domain was registered before or after 10/12, the .RS IDN must be registered with the accredited registrar with whom the corresponding .RS domain is already registered.
RNIDS’ registration fees for .RS IDNs will be the same as the fees for registration of the corresponding .RS domain in all domain spaces (.RS, .CO.RS, .ORG.RS, .EDU.RS, .IN.RS).
You can find more detailed information about the procedure for registration of .RS IDN domains at viševredi.rs.