Latvian domain names

Initially, domain names could only contain Latin characters, numbers and hyphen ‘-’ but due to the growth of the Internet, domain names also containing characters from other languages and scripts were introduced. Such domain names are called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

Since 1 March 2004, NIC.LV has offered the possibility to register Latvian domain names – domain names that also contain characters with diacritical marks - ā, ē, ī, ū, ō, ķ, ļ, ņ, ŗ, ģ, š, č, ž.

IDNs are supported by all modern web browsers; to check if your browser supports Latvian domain names, use the following link http://tūdaliņ.lv.

If you wish to register a Latvian domain name, you should take into account that:

• Your website users should be able to enter letters with Latvian diacritical marks. Therefore, before sending your websites address to your partner abroad, make sure that they can enter these characters;
• In your technical records and invoices, the Latvian domain name will be expressed in ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding) string. For example, the ACE (ASCII sequences) representation of the domain name tūdaliņ.lv is xn-tdali-d8a8w.lv.’

Actually in the DNS registry IDNs are registered as traditional domain names that look like a seemingly incoherent string. For word conversion, the Punycode algorithm is being used. That allows to converting Unicode to ASCII and vice versa. The converted domain name is called ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding) domain name and can be identified by the prefix “xn-”.

To get your Latvian domain name’s ACE format, use this form: lvdomain
RFC: Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)
Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)