ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization which oversees website addresses will begin testing eleven new languages for domains names.Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.

“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits.”

The evaluation is made possible by today’s insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet. Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 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. The evaluation is being done in the 11 languages of the Internet communities that have shown the most interest in moving IDNs from concept to reality.