Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 6 – After refusing since its launch last year to register sites in anything but a Russian language format, the .RF domain has now opened registration to 18 non-Russian languages which use Cyrillic alphabets and allows them to use one or more of the 25 additional letters they use to capture the sounds of their languages.
One the one hand, this might appear to be a concession to the non-Russians; but on the other, it may set the stage for an internet world in the Russian Federation in which only .rf addresses are allowed, something that would work powerfully against these very same peoples (75.ru/news/452209 reposted at asiarussia.ru/news/51865/).
But even if things do not reach such a pass, this action adds to the pressures Moscow has placed on non-Russian languages not written in Cyrillic, including most prominently Karelian, which is the only titular nationality of a non-Russian republic that is not a state language within its territory.
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