MARINA DEL REY, CALIF. - Internet users around the globe can now experiment with their name in their language on their Internet with the launch of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) live testing of Internationalized Domain Names in 11 languages on October 15, 2007, a press release by ICANN stated.
Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in the 11 test languages -- Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language -- one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.
ICANN has also put a video explaining the evaluation process on YouTube, and available on the ICANN website.
The wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of one of the 11 languages, or by going to http://idn.icann.org.
The 11 evaluation wikis will remain online until IDNs are fully implemented and the first top-level domain is introduced in the evaluation language.
The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and the like 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.