Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) enable people around the world to use domain names in local languages and scripts. (Languages are used by speech communities to communicate. Scripts are used to write the different languages.) IDNs are formed using characters from different scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Devanagari.
An internationalized domain name is a domain name that contains non-ASCII characters. Basically these are characters not represented by the Latin A-Z alphabet. This can include everything from the Chinese and Arabic alphabets to the French accent grave and the German Umlaut.
Since over 70% of the world's Internet users are non-English speakers, IDNs are a huge opportunity to connect with your target audience in their language not just on your website, but also with your domain name.
By allowing users to access the Internet in their chosen online identities and local languages, private sectors, governments, and civil societies have the ability to better serve their communities and take advantage of significant business opportunities.
There are now IDN top-level domains (TLDs) in 37 languages and 23 scripts that have been delegated into the root zone. The languages include Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Bangla, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Korean, Lao, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Mongolian, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Santali, Serbian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Ukrainian, and Urdu. The scripts include Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai.
According to the IDN Word Report, there have been a total of 8.3 million IDN registrations under ccTLDs and gTLDs, up from 2 million in 2010. With less than 2 million IDN registrations under the gTLDs, the majority – approximately 77 percent of registrations – are under ccTLDs.
The majority of IDN registrations under gTLDs are in the Chinese script (51 percent) followed by the Latin script (23 percent).