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Comment by MartinCron | Hacker News Reader

This is already happening. The TLD for Spain is .es

Also Germany (.de), Switzerland (.ch), Croatia (.hr), and several more. It's quite common. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_doma...

I don't think it's "es" for "español (Spaniards don't speak Spanish), it's "es" for "España".

Yes, I knew it was "España" but I was too lazy to get the special character.

But, um, what do the people in Spain speak if not Spanish?

They speak español.

Castellano or Catalan, perhaps?

and also Basque (Euskara), Galego (Galician) and a maybe couple of other languages with a quite representative number of speakers.

There are five co-official languages recognized in the various regions of Spain: Castellano (everywhere), Aranese (Catalonia), Basque (Basque Country), Catalan (Catalonia), and Galician (Galicia).

In addition, there are several localized languages, that are not "official" but "recognized": Aragonese (Aragon), Asturian (Asturias), and Leonese (Castile and León).

And there are countless dialects of each.

For what is worth, Galician is essentially a variant of Portuguese, in the sense that it's mutually intelligible with European and Brazilian Portuguese. There are differences in pronunciation but not significantly more than between European and Brazilian Portuguese.

For what it's worth, Spain's Royal Language Academy has called the language "español" since 1923, and 89% of Spaniards reported being fluent in it in 2005. So saying Spaniards don't speak Spanish is like saying Americans don't speak English.

That's just ISO country codes.

IE is IrEland because IR is IRan, and Iran comes before Ireland alphabetically.

I think you mean in their native character set, rather than native language

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