Language-specific domains

What this means in practice

The word for petition is different in every language, and so is our domain. A few examples:

Several languages have more than one domain, so a campaign can sit on an address that belongs to its own country: Spanish petitions run on peticiones.mx, peticiones.cl and peticion.es among others, and French ones on petitionenligne.be, petitionenligne.ch and petitionenligne.re. The full list is on the Choose your language page.

How this differs from most platforms

Most petition platforms put every language under one brand domain and tell the languages apart with a prefix or a path. The address of a German petition then begins with an English brand name that a German speaker has to spell out letter by letter over the phone.

We have taken the slower road: a domain per language, each one a word its speakers already know. It costs more to run, and it means the service is called something different in each language, but the address of your petition reads as if it were made for the people you are asking to sign.

Why it matters for a petition

• Posters and flyers. A short address in the reader's own language survives being printed small and read in passing.
• Saying it out loud. At a meeting, on the radio or at a market stall, you can say the address once and be understood.
• Trust. People are more willing to type an address they can read than a foreign brand name they cannot.
• Being found. People search for petitions in their own language, and the words of that language are in the domain.

You can shorten it further by choosing your own petition address, so the whole link becomes something like adressit.com/your-cause.

Who this helps, with an example

A hospital workers' union in Finland collects signatures on paper at the entrance and wants the same petition to keep collecting online. The address printed on the sheet is adressit.com and the petition's own path, which every Finnish reader understands at a glance.

When the union later adds a Swedish version for its Swedish-speaking members, that version gets a skrivunder.com address of its own. Both versions link to each other, and the signatures land in one list.

Limits and good to know

Not every language has a domain of its own. Less widely used languages share the petitions.com domain through a language-specific subdomain, for example ja.petitions.com for Japanese and ru.petitions.com for Russian. Everything works the same way there.

A petition is on the domain of the language it is written in. The English version of any petition has a petitions.com address.

If your petition has several language versions, their addresses are on different domains by design. A Change language line above the petition title carries the reader from one to another, so you can still promote a single link and let people find their own language from there.