URLs are no longer confined fully to the English language or
Latin script because of a new trend in
Internet domains - the rise of the IDNs (the internationalized domain names).
At the end of 2010 existing IDNs were heavily concentrated in areas such as the Middle East and India, the latter in particular because of the high level of official languages within the country. Beyond this field many more countries were excited about the move, Russia and China celebrated the idea of taking the Internet and transforming it into their own tongues.
Russian President Medvedev has spoken of how IDNs will become a “symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic [script]". The introduction of the РФ registrar happened on November 11th and proved a huge success. Domain registering rose from 18,000 on the first day to 575,000 two weeks later.
The internationalized
domain names will offer a practical relief for more than a billion Internet users who everyday have to use scripts and characters from often unfamiliar languages in order to access the web. Over 50% of Internet content is non-English, but still billions of people have to enter URLs in English or Latinate scripts. If non-English content expands to its forecasting levels of over 75% by 2020 then it just isn’t reasonable to keep forcing global users to access the web in this limited way.
