Do you support all Chinese dialects and scripts?

Yes.

Chinese is considered by most linguists and sinologists to be a "language family" -- Chinese consists of more than 250 spoken dialects which share a more-or-less common writing system (either the original Traditional Chinese script or the post-1949 Simplified Chinese script). Native speakers of major Chinese dialect groups do not generally understand each others' dialects.

The dominant dialect of Chinese is Mandarin, which is spoken by about 960 million people. According to a 2007 China Ministry of Education survey, only 53% of Chinese citizens can speak Mandarin. That study found that in rural areas of China, only 45% of citizens can speak Mandarin.

Counted by numbers of native speakers, the next most common dialects after Mandarin are Wu (roughly, Shanghainese) which is spoken by about 80 million people; Yue (roughly, Cantonese) which is spoken by about 60 million people; and Min (roughly, Fujianese) which is spoken by about 50 million people.

TLD Registry's mission is to make the Chinese web more accessible and safer for all Chinese people -- not just for the 53% who speak Mandarin, or those who use the Simplified Chinese script. It is due to the extraordinary diversity of Chinese people and the languages they speak and write that we strive to make Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website useful for all Chinese, whether in China or around the world. To do anything less would be an abrogation of our responsibility to the cultural treasures that 5000 years of Chinese culture have brought to the world.

ICANN policy on exactly how the Chinese language family can work within Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website is still unclear. As Chinese internet experts, we are proactively working to provide China's three main official scripts -- Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Pinyin -- at launch time.

We'll be writing more about our Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website's mission to make the web fully-Chinese for all Chinese speakers and writers in subsequent articles.

Article by Simon Cousins, Director of Marketing and Communications