Bulgaria and Russia are going to agree on a joint list containing Internet terms and domains in Cyrillic.

This agreement has been reached during the sixth meeting of the Permanent Bulgarian-Russian Working Group on “Information Society, announced the press center of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Transport, IT, and Communications.

The concluding document containing the agreement was signed by Bulgaria’s Deputy Transport Minister, Parvan Rusinov, and Oleg Chutov, Directorate Head in the Russian Ministry of Mass Communications.

Thus, Bulgaria and Russia are going to start discussing the options for an equivalent of “www” in Cyrillic. Their joint position is going to be presented to the large Internet search engine companies such as Google and Yahoo.

The two countries are going to exchange a list of prohibited website names for their new national Cyrillic Internet domains, “.бг“ for Bulgaria, and “.рф“ for Russia.

The move to coordinate Cyrillic Internet domains on part of the Bulgaria and Russia is the result of the decision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to introduce Internet addresses and domains in scripts different from the Latin alphabet, including Cyrillic.

Bulgaria has submitted a request with the ICANN to register “.бг“ as its official national Cyrillic domain.

The Bulgarian and Russian versions of the Cyrillic alphabet are very similar. Bulgarian has 30 Cyrillic letters which are written exactly the same way in Russian; the only difference is that the Russian language has 3 more Cyrillic letters, i.e. a total of 33 letters. Other languages using the Cyrillic alphabet such as Serbian have slightly more variations.