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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009
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Web Addresses Will Gain International Flavor

Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew domains, among others, will have support by 2010: ICANN

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(Newser) – In the biggest change ever to the system, Web domains will soon be available in the native scripts of Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and other non-Latin-based languages. A proposal expected to be approved this week means “Internationalized Domain Names” could be up and running as soon as mid-2010. China and Thailand currently offer support for domains in their languages with non-standard workarounds, ZDNet reports.

“Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said the president of ICANN, which oversees international domain naming. “So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”

Some domain names using non-Latin characters.
Some domain names using non-Latin characters.   (ICANN)
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7 comments
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drlarrymitchell
Oct 26, 09 5:20 PM CDT
Que? Reply
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+2
Enoughie
Oct 26, 09 6:53 PM CDT
Looks like a great opportunity to make lots of $$$ from new domain names. Anyone knows how to spell "google" in Chinese? Reply
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+3
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custum
Oct 26, 09 11:17 PM CDT
B-A-I-D-U
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0
kyleleitch
Oct 26, 09 7:49 PM CDT
I wonder if there will be any sort of intertransliteration system so that people who use a roman alphabet can visit non-roman websites? Reply
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+1
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shonangreg
Oct 26, 09 9:04 PM CDT
From what I recall, yes. It will. You'll get the base, latinized name, and then another layer will be matched over the top of that. Some url's, though, will have multiple local scripts represented by the same Latin script, so it is not a direct correlation in every case. ............................ I may be wrong on this, but that is how I understood this scheme when it was brought up before. The original ZDNet article does not get into this level of detail.
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