shadenights

NEW YORK: The Roman alphabet will lose some of its dominance of the Internet beginning Monday when the organization overseeing website addresses starts testing 11 new languages for domain names.

In a long-awaited break from its devotion to the Roman alphabet, ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — announced on Thursday that it will test registering website domain names in Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. “This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said ICAAN president and chief executive Paul Twomey.

People creating web addresses with non-Roman lettering will be routed to a wiki page and required to use “.test” instead of commonly used domain name endings such as .com or .net. The results of the test will determine whether ICANN sanctions using languages written in alphabets other than English for complete domain names. Presently, website creators can use other language characters before the dots in website addresses, but endings must be in English characters such as .com or .net.

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