Technology Network

      The Internet has been long limited to its Latinized domain names. This has been the norm ever since the inception of the Internet over 40 years ago. That, however, is about to end if the Internet's regulatory body Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) goes ahead with its plans to bring in web addresses with non-Latin characters.

      The initial proposal to bring in other languages into domain names was approved in 2008. However, from what we now know, testing of the system had been underway for quite some time now. The plan then was to include certain Asian and Arabic scripts for web addresses. In its latest announcement ICANN has said that should the plans to implement this is approved, it would start taking applications for the new Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) by the second week of November. In fact, by mid 2010, we might see a fairly large number of websites out there with non-Latin domain names.

      With over half of the Internet populace using languages other than English for communication, it kind of made sense to introduce multi linguistic support for web addresses. With this move, it no longer becomes necessary to know English to be able to use the Internet.

      Once approved, ICANN will apply "necessary changes" to the Internet's current Domain Name System (DNS) to translate non-English characters to something that the system understands. Essentially, it will be a huge real-time multi language translator at work. It might be interesting to note that "unapproved" workarounds for typing in web addresses in local languages have been tried in the past as well - mainly in countries like China and Korea. However, these were often buggy and were not internationally recognized and had issues working on all computers. The new IDN includes many new languages including Chinese, Hindi, Tamil, Japanese, Korean, Persian and Yiddish

      If this proposal eventually gets the nod, it might not be long when your grandparents would be typing away web addresses in their own languages instead of English.