Currently one of the key areas in progress towards multilinguilisation of the Internet revolves around the complex issue of the domain name system (DNS) whish was originally developed using the ASCII character set, employing only Roman characters and a limited number of symbols. An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system. (Also read Geoff Huston article: Internationalizing the Internet) Read the full background at Multilinguism Wikipedia