Sri Lanka's Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) announced this week that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the use of Sinhala and Tamil language in website addresses, a move that ICTA said "would go a long way in making Sri Lankans, especially the rural folk, move speedily towards the ideals of world fellowship and global village”.
To determine the true impact of this potential paradigm shift, the Business Times spoke to local industry opinion leaders to ascertain how Sri Lankans and their online habits may be affected.
According to Prof. Gihan Dias, who heads the local body tasked with assigning Sri Lankan domain names or web addresses, the LK Domain Registry; Sri Lankans currently online already have a good knowledge of English and many can even type in English.
As such, rather than commercial organisations, it is more likely that more government organisations would make use of this service to experience the World Wide Web (WWW) in local languages. He further indicated that eventually banks, insurers and other mass market retailers would also want to extend their online offerings to consumers in all three languages, which would also necessitate the website addresses in Sinhala and Tamil. He also suggested that, while initially there would be a lot of take up of this feature in the public sector, this demand would ultimately be outstripped by interest stemming from the private sector in little as two years.
He also indicated that since many local bloggers and social-networkers had already embraced Sinhala as their preference, it was only a matter of time before local language script in website addresses caught up.
However, Managing Director of local website developer Pyxle, Preshantha Jayamaha, suggests that there is no foreseeable demand, at least among his clients, for local language scripts in website addresses since most local businesses who talked to him had the objective of more effectively tapping international markets, with only about 5% interested in local retention.
He further indicated that previous experiences with online search engines such as Google suggested to him that the use of local language in web-related searches had a long way to go before becoming adequately user-friendly. He however did accept that there might be some cultural value in the use of local language scripts in certain websites. Meanwhile, online marketing veteran and co-founder of digital marketing agency 360 Interactive, Sanjay Mendis, believes that more local language content would surely promote search engines to feature more localised content and local websites and ultimately create a stronger online identity for Sri Lanka.
This was already increasingly the case with blogs such as WordPress now offering Sinhala and Tamil blogging potential. Additionally, with more local language blogs and communities springing up all the time, the messaging suggested online was increasingly that Sri Lanka had a country vision.
He also indicated that, in a softer way, these facets of culture allowed for added identification, visibility and macro-branding which would continue to bring Sri Lanka to top of mind; and, at the same time, bring in additional revenues to the country as all Sinhala and Tamil domain names or web addresses had to be registered locally. |
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