Go Global

The content of a website can appear in any language, but domain names have generally been limited to the characters used in English. Since the majority of the world speaks a language other than English, this can present a significant barrier to internet access for many cultures.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) refer to the ability to use characters from any language (e.g., á, ç, è, ñ, ö) in domain names. While there is common agreement that introducing IDNs is a worthwhile objective, there are inherent technical challenges complicating implementation. In addition, the Domain Name System (DNS) that links text-based website names to their numeric IP addresses primarily uses the ASCII character set, which is not designed to support languages other than English.

Working with standards-setting bodies and the engineering community, .ORG helped spearhead efforts to find effective IDN solutions. Today, a simple, efficient encoding method called Punycode is used to register domain names in native languages by translating non-ASCII characters into characters allowed in host name labels (ASCII letters, digits and hyphens) and back again.

If an IDN that is registered and has a character variants according to the appropriate language authority, then those IDN variants will be reserved and restricted for registration by the registry.

IDNs are currently available for .ORG registration in the following:

IDN Language Script/Policy

IDN Language Tag

Effective Date

Chinese
Danish
German
Hungarian
Icelandic
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Polish
Spanish
Swedish