Letter ‘ñ’, the ‘ü’ and vowels carrying graphic accents in Spanish domain names

Letter ‘ñ’ is an integral part of the Spanish language. I wasn’t aware until last week that this letter and many other characters used by Castilian Spanish and other languages from Spain, were still not allowed to register in Spanish domain names.

But reading El Mundo last week, I’ve found that all of that has been changed since June this year. And it’s not only letter ‘ñ’ that can be registered; the list includes vowels carrying the graphic accents and the u with dieresis (‘ü’). Apart from letter ‘ñ’ the list of incorporated new characters affecting Castilian Spanish is: ‘á’, ‘é’, ‘í’, ‘ó’, ‘ú’ and ‘ü’.

Spanish is a language that requires all the special characters listed above in its standard written forms. Thus ‘ñ’, ‘ü’ and the graphically accented vowels as essential parts of the language were sorely needed for registering correctly Spanish domain names requiring such characters.

According to El Mundo, RAE – the Spanish initials for the Royal Spanish Language Academy – is celebrating this milestone as a great cultural achievement for the Spanish language.

This change will surely contribute to promote a proper usage of standard written Spanish on the web as well as making it easier to search for Spanish terms using correct spelling that also includes proper graphic accents.