EURid, the organisation in charge of the .eu top level domain is looking to introduce IDN’s. The registry of the .eu top-level domain, is planning the implementation of IDNs at the second level before the ‘dot’. IDNs under .eu will be set to cover all 23 official languages of the European Union.

Definition of an IDN

An internationalised domain (IDN) is a domain name that contains characters which do not appear in the standard Latin script. These characters are things like é, ç or ö - they are often used in languages other than English.

Essentially, IDNs allow people to enter website addresses in their native language. So, for example, a Russian website address could be entered using the Cyrillic alphabet.

IDNs have not yet been introduced across the board. Different registries are responsible for different top level domains (like .uk or .eu), and they are all implementing IDNs at different rates.