Why should you misspell your name online?

BarcelonaThe Internet and the digital services that depend on it are a global network, but in practice it is biased towards the Latin alphabet and the basic ASCII characters. If you write from right to left, in Cyrillic, or if your name contains an open accent or your brand a geminated accent, you will encounter all kinds of inconveniences when using them: you will not be able to register a domain that corresponds exactly to your name or brand, emails will not go out or will not arrive, and web forms. Incidents like these seem technical, but they are symptoms of a deeper problem: the lack ofuniversal acceptance, still in 2025.

A global problem with local effects

There are 161 different scripts used worldwide, but the digital world doesn't reflect this diversity. The Latin alphabet, the most common, serves 305 languages and 4.9 billion speakers, followed by 1.3 billion Chinese speakers and 660 million Arabic speakers.

To understand the magnitude of the problem, it's necessary to clarify basic concepts. A TLD (top level domain) is the domain extension that appears after the period in a web address, such as .cat, .com, or .org. An IDN (internationalized domain name) is a domain name that contains non-ASCII characters, such as accents, diacritics, or letters from non-Latin alphabets, which allows domains to reflect local languages and scripts.

Theuniversal acceptance (UA) goes further: it consists of including domain names in scripts and alphabets other than Latin (such as пример.р� or 例子.中国), domain names with non-ASCII characters before the period (for example, gala.cat) and email addresses that contain before or after the @ sign (for example, gala@.

Catalan, with eleven special characters ( · , à, ç, è, é, í, ï, ó, ó, ú, ü) that distinguish its Latin alphabet, is one of the many languages affected by the digital hegemony of English.

As documented by the BBC in a study on the languages absent from the internet, many languages have lost unique cultural expressions due to the limitations of keyboards and the dictatorship of spell checkers automatic. Hawaiian, for example, has seen traditional words transformed to adapt to digital systems, causing them to lose ancient nuances. In some African dialects, expressions describing specific concepts of the weather or family relationships have disappeared from digital texts because the systems do not recognize the necessary characters.

In the case of Catalan, the fight over the geminated l exemplifies this conflict. This character, which in old linotype printing machines was a single movable type, does not exist in the digital world as an entity in its own right. Despite the Claims from language activists and the IEC itself in the Unicode Consortium to include it correctly, today it is barely solved with two lines separated at best by a flying point.

Digital disproportion

Global figures demonstrate this discrimination: while English represents 52% of internet content, it is spoken by only 5.4% of the world's population. In contrast, Chinese, spoken by more than 1.3 billion people, represents only 2% of digital content. This disproportion is systematically repeated: languages with hundreds of millions of speakers have a minimal digital presence.

As for internationalized domains, the figures reveal the limited reach of the 'universal acceptanceAccording to Beatriz Guzmán, director of the .cat domain, the 4.4 million IDN domains represent 69% of ccTLDs (country-linked domains) but only a scant 1.2% of the world's total. The most popular are Russian ones, which have managed to maintain their digital identity despite pressures for uniformity.

The Catalan case perfectly illustrates this marginalization. Although the .cat domain was created in 2006 as the first linguistic and cultural domain in the world to accept the symbols specific to the Catalan language, of the 113,000 existing domains, only 1,249 use IDN characters, a meager 1.1% of the total.

Everyday Obstacles

The practical reality is devastating. Less than 26% of email servers have internationalized addresses. This limitation has concrete consequences for users' daily lives. BarcaStore, as the platform doesn't recognize Catalan characters.

Experiments demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. Chinese, which shows that the incompatibility is not technical but commercial.

This situation forces users to make daily renunciations of their linguistic identity. Many Catalans opt for accent-free domains to avoid compatibility issues, perpetuating a cycle that normalizes the absence of their own characters. This is a subtle but effective form of digital assimilation.

A paradigmatic example is payment systems. Until recently, Bizum did not allow the use of the broken C, forcing Catalan users to modify their names. The service was only adapted after pressure from Platform for the Language, and banking institutions have gradually accepted Catalan special characters.

Existing solutions, absent will

The problem is not technological. The protocols for theuniversal acceptance They already exist and are mature. The infrastructure is ready; the necessary standards exist, and the base architecture is compatible. What's lacking is political and commercial will.

Tech giants tend to standardize cultures to simplify their processes, while domain registrars believe that taking into account so many variants complicates their activity and doesn't generate enough business. It's a predetermined discrimination that has real effects on millions of speakers.

However, some cases demonstrate that compatibility is possible when there is a will. Renfe allows tickets to be purchased with an email address that includes accented letters, demonstrating that technical solutions exist. And Guzmán assures the ARA that some domain registrars are beginning to take an interest in the technical requirements for offering IDN domains.

A fundamental digital right

Language compatibility on the internet is not a cultural whim, but a fundamental digital right. If the internet is to be truly universal, it must be able to include all languages, all their identities, all characters, and all accents, without exception.

Until the tech industry takes responsibility for its duty to protect cultural diversity, we will enjoy the privilege of theoretically having all the letters available without the practical right to use them normally. An internet that doesn't allow writing l·l It's not everyone's internet: it's only for a few.