Internationalized Domain Names

Each Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) must be associated with a specific language per guidelines developed by the ICANN Registry Implementation Committee (RIC). This information is called a "language tag". The language tag is used to identify the language of the IDN.

For example, if you are registering the IDN "日本語.com", you would select "Japanese" as the language because the IDN is in the Japanese language. The user selects the most appropriate language tag for the IDN during the registration process.
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Can I change the language of an IDN later?

The language must be selected during the registration process. Once the registration is completed, the language cannot be changed. This feature will be released in a future core software deployment.
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What if a domain name combines languages?

Domain names can only be associated with one language. If a domain name combines languages, you must select the most appropriate language. The tag "No language" will no longer be an option as of April 24, 2004.
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What languages are available?

The VeriSign Valid Language Tag List establishes what languages are available. VeriSign supports IDNs in the following languages:

Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Aragonese
Armenian
Assamese
Asturian; Bable
Avestan
Awadhi
Azerbaijani
Balinese
Baluchi
Basa
Bashkir
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bhojpuri
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Carib
Catalan
Chechen
Chinese
Chuvash
Coptic
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Divehi
Dogri
Dutch; Flemish
English
Estonian
Faroese
Fijian

Finnish
French
Frisian
Gaelic
Georgian
German
Gondi
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indic
Indonesian
Ingush
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kashmiri
Kazakh
Khmer
Kirghiz
Korean
Kurdish
Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Letzeburgesch
Macedonian
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Moldavian
Mongolian

Nepali
Norwegian
Oriya
Ossetian
Panjabi
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Pushto
Rajasthani
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Sanskrit
Sardinian
Serbian
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Syriac
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Tibetan
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

Why do I need to select a language?

Internationalized Domain names must be associated with a specific language so that appropriate language rules can be applied to the domain name, if necessary. The language rules are designed to prevent the registration of domain names that could potentially confuse end users.

At this time, only a small number of languages have language rules, including Chinese and Japanese. We are collecting the language tag information now so that it will be available should other languages develop language rules in the future.
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How does a language tag impact a registration?

When a language tag is received it is checked against a list of languages that have character inclusion tables or character variant mapping tables. These tables are applied to the Unicode code points that make up a registration and determine whether the registration is valid for a specific language.
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If a registration fails for a specific language, does that mean that it is unavailable for all languages?

How should the language tag be deployed?

Can I use a default language tag?

If you are certain that the registrations that your customers will want will be of one language then it is low risk for a registrar to use their own default language tag. However, should the registration be for a language other than the default, the appropriate rules will not be applied. For example, if a registrar decided to use a default of Chinese and a registration was submitted using Cyrillic characters, the registration would be rejected because Cyrillic characters are not permitted under the Chinese character inclusion table.
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What is a registration variant?

A registration variant is created when a language specific registration contains characters that could be replaced by other language specific characters or character variants. For example, some Latin based languages view the 'ø' and the 'ö' as the same character and can be interchanged. These characters are considered character variants. So a registration such as 'thørn.com' that contains character variants could be a registration variant of 'thörn.com'
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What languages have character variant mapping tables?

Currently, Chinese is the only language with a variant mapping table. There may be others in the near future.
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What languages have character inclusion tables?

Chinese, Japanese and Korean are currently deployed. Polish, Greek, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian will be deployed on April 24, 2004.
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How are variants determined?

Local cctlds and others are working with relevant language experts to determine the appropriate mapping and inclusion tables.
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IDN FAQs - Language Tags

What is the language of a domain name?