Many of you will know I'm a linguist by hobby. I'm also a technophile. So when technology, in this case the internet, crosses language barriers I'm particularly excited. It should still be a few years before non-Latin domain names begin appearing on the internet, but it's nevertheless a pretty revolutionary development.
Oct 10, 2007
telecomasia.net
Internet domain names group ICANN is about to trial non-Latin language
domain names in what it says is one of the biggest changes ever to the Net.
It will begin a pilot of top-level Internationalized Domain Names
(IDNs) in 11 languages next Monday.
Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with
the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese
(simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese
and Tamil, ICANN said in a statement.
“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards
the full implementation of IDNs. This will be one of the biggest changes to the
Internet since it was created,” said ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey.
The evaluation is made possible by the insertion into the root of the
11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains
like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet.
The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own sub-pages
with their own names in their own language. “The evaluation is being done in the
11 languages of the Internet communities that have shown the most interest in
moving IDNs from concept to reality,” said the statement.
The introduction of IDNs allows users to write the whole of a domain
name in the characters used to write their own language. Right now, they
can only use these characters before the dot, and as a result .com, .net, .org
and other suffixes can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will
change this so that literally tens of thousands of characters will be available
to the world.
“Right now only the ASCII characters a through z are available for use
in top level labels — the part of the address after the dot,” Twomey said.
“Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when
full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the
languages of world.”
