A .ca Address With French Accents

A name with an accent

Plenty of Canadian businesses have an accent in their name: a café, a crêperie, a salon named after its owner. On the sign and the menu, the accent is part of the name.

For years the web address could not carry it. Domain names were limited to plain letters, numbers and hyphens, so the café became cafe in the address and everyone moved on.

That changed some years ago: the .ca registry now accepts French accented characters. A business can register its name as it is written, accent included.

Whether it should use that address, rather than simply hold it, is a separate question.

What the registry allows

The accepted characters are the accented letters used in French, such as é, è, à, ç and ô, alongside the usual letters, numbers and hyphens.

Versions of a name that differ only by accents are treated as a bundle. Once someone holds one version, the others are reserved for them, and nobody else can register them.

Each version still has to be registered on its own before it works, and every name in the bundle must be held by the same registrant through the same registrar.

Where the accent gets lost

Behind the scenes, an accented name is converted into plain letters before it travels anywhere. The converted form starts with xn--, so café.ca travels as xn--caf-dma.ca.

• Typing: most office keyboards in English Canada have no key for an accented letter.
• Phones: the accent sits behind a long press on the letter.
• Speaking: "with an accent on the e" is forgotten by the next day.
• Email: support for accented addresses is still uneven.
• Encoded form: some software shows the xn-- string instead of the name.

The fourth is the one that settles most of the decision. A domain that cannot reliably receive email is a poor choice for the address a business hands out.

What browsers show

Current versions of the major browsers generally show an accented address with its accents in the address bar.

Older software, and some settings, show the encoded form instead. To a customer, a string of letters starting with xn-- looks like a typing mistake or something suspicious.

That uncertainty is the reason to treat the accented version as a second door into the site, rather than the address the business hands out.

Keep email on the plain version

An email address on an accented domain depends on every system along the way handling it: the sender's email program, their provider, any form it is typed into, and your own mail server.

Support for accented characters in email addresses has improved, but it is patchy, and plenty of website forms and business software still reject them as invalid.

A customer who cannot get your address past a form will not try twice. Keep every working mailbox on the plain domain.

What to print and say aloud

The plain version is the one people can type on any keyboard and spell from memory. That makes it the address for business cards, vans, invoices, radio spots and the voicemail greeting.

Saying the name with its accent asks the listener to remember a detail most will drop. If they drop it and the plain version works, nothing is lost.

The accented version earns its place where the name appears exactly as written: the sign, the logo, the menu. People who copy the name from there should still arrive.

A worked example

A board game cafe on an older shopping street has café in its name, accent included, on the sign, the cups and the menus. Its web address had been the plain version since it opened.

Some customers typed the name the way it appeared on the cup, accent and all. The accented version had never been registered, so they reached nothing and assumed the cafe had no website.

The owners nearly went the other way, planning to move the website and email to the accented version to match the sign.

Instead they registered the accented version through the same registrar, pointed it at the existing site with a permanent redirect, and left email and printed material on the plain address.

Both names were set to renew automatically, and the site's security certificate was reissued to cover the accented one as well.

Pointing both at one site

Two addresses showing the same pages give search engines a small puzzle: duplicate content, and a guess about which address to list.

A permanent redirect, known as a 301, settles it. Every visitor and every search engine that arrives at the accented address is sent on to the plain one.

Choose one address as the main one and redirect the other to it. For most businesses the plain version is easier to live with.

Certificates and renewals

A site served over HTTPS has a certificate listing the addresses it covers. If the accented name is missing, a visitor who arrives on it securely gets a warning before the redirect can happen.

Because each version is a separate registration, each also has its own expiry date. A renewal notice sent to an old email address is all it takes for one to lapse unnoticed.

Set both to renew automatically, keep the contact details current, and list both wherever the business records its domains.

The counter-case

Some businesses reasonably make the accented address their main one: a French-language business whose customers type accents every day, or a brand where the accent is the whole point.

That can work, with the plain version redirecting to it, and with email kept on the plain domain regardless.

And a business with no accent in its name has nothing to do here beyond knowing the option exists.

For most, though: register both, redirect the accented one, and print, say and email the plain one.

The order to do it in

1. Check your name for accents wherever it appears.
2. Register the accented version through your current registrar.
3. Redirect it permanently to your main address.
4. Add it to the certificate on your site.
5. Keep every mailbox on the plain domain.
6. Print the plain address everywhere.
7. Set both names to renew automatically.

Step three is what makes owning the accented name worth anything. Without the redirect, people who type the accent reach an empty address, which is no better than not owning it.

Who is allowed to hold either version in the first place is covered in who can own a .ca address.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.