What is the language of a domain name?
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.

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.

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.

What languages are available?
ISO 639-2 establishes what languages are available. WebNIC.c supports IDNs in the following languages:

Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Faroese Finnish French

Georgian German Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Italian Japanese Korean Kurdish Lao Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malayalam Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese

Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Syriac Tamil Thai Tibetan Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese

Why do I need to select a language?
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.

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

If a registration fails for a specific language, does that mean that it is unavailable for all languages?
No. Different characters are available for different language tags.

How should the language tag be deployed?
As you refer to our registration process starting 6th April 2004, you will find a list of language tag available for selection during registration of IDN.

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.

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 '?d the '?s the same character and can be interchanged. These characters are considered character variants. So a registration such as 'th?om' that contains character variants could be a registration variant of 'th?com'

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

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.

How are variants determined?
Local cctlds and others are working with relevant language experts to determine the appropriate mapping and inclusion tables.

Can I activate a reserved variant?
Not at this time.

Will this IDN language tag affect my existing IDN?
No, you existing or registered IDN will worked as it is. No impact on existing registered IDN after language tag launch.