Using special Norwegian characters

You are free to use special Norwegian characters in your domain name. You should however take certain factors into account if you choose to do this.

By special Norwegian characters, we mean all characters required for correct spelling in the official Norwegian written languages: Norwegian bokmål, Norwegian nynorsk, North Sámi, South Sámi and Lule Sámi. The special Norwegian character set comprises a total of 23 characters, of which æ, ø and å are the most frequently used.

By international standard characters, we mean the letters a-z, the figures 0-9 and hyphen.

Not as robust

Domain names with special Norwegian characters are not as robust in use as domain names that include only international standard characters. This is because there are still browsers and email programmes that do not support such characters in addresses. In addition, not all characters can be keyed in from all keyboards.

If you want a name with special Norwegian characters, we recommend that you also register a version of the domain name with standard characters only.

Rewrite into standard characters

In stead of registering national characters, you can rewrite some of the special Norwegian characters into standard characters. We recommend the following standard:

æ -> a
ø -> o
å -> a

Other special characters must be translated to the best of your judgement.

Domain names in all languages

Until 2003 it was impossible to register domain names with other characters than the international standard set. Then they had a joint technical solution in place which made it possible to registere other characters as well.

Norid opened up for registering national characters in 2004. During the last years several countries have launched solutions for their national characters, such as Cyrillic, Chinese and Arab. Now also the top level code - what comes after the dot - may be registered with national characters.

Conversion of national characters

In the Domain Name System (DNS) it is still only possible to register names that consist of international standard characters. Other characters must be converted by means of a technique called IDN (Internationalized Domain Names). The result is the ACE version of the domain, which is an international standard that makes it possible to handle national characters in all email programmes and browsers. It is the ACE version that is then registered in the DNS.

The ACE version can be used both by programmes that support IDN and by older programmes that do not. Programmes that support IDN will even be able to convert between the two versions, so that the user could see and type the domain name with national characters as well as the ACE version.

However, the converted name will not be readable as it stands. For instance, blåbærsyltetøy.no will be converted to xn--blbrsyltety-y8ao3x.no. Try our convertion tool to see how a domain name will look in an ACE coded version.

Useful links

• Frequently asked questions about registering a domain name
• Software that handles national characters