It's Māori Language Week in New Zealand and on this occasion we're very proud to announce support for Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) at iWantMyName. Indigenous groups around the world are looking seriously at how best to protect their digital identity, as the Internet continues to impact powerfully in both in economic and sociological terms. Providing Internationalised Domain Names not only for the use of Māori language domains but non-Latin characters in general is a small but significant step towards preserving the expression of language and culture online.

Internationalised Domain Names can be accessed in any modern web browser such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer (> Version 7.0 which is another reaseon why IE 6 must die).

IDNs at iWantMyName are currently supported in the following domain extensions.

Generic top-level domains:

• .COM, .NET (nearly all languages and character sets - more information)
• .ORG (Spanish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese)
• .INFO (Danish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Swedish, Spanish)
• .BIZ (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese)

Country code top-level domains (in alphabetical order):

• .AT - Austria (supported characters)
• .AC - Ascension Island (IDN Policy)
• .CC - Cocos & Keeling Islands (nearly all languages and character sets - more information)
• .CH - Switzerland (supported characters)
• .CN - China (Simplified or Traditional Chinese)
• .DE - Germany (supported characters)
• .DK - Denmark (æ, ø, å, ö, ä, ü, and/or é)
• .ES - Spain (supported characters)
• .IO - British Indian Ocean Territory (IDN Policy)
• .JP - Japan (Kanji, Hiragana & Katakana)
• .LA - Laos (supported languages)
• .LI - Liechtenstein (supported characters)
• .NU - Niue (All Western and Eastern European languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hindi, Thai, Lao, etc. - see all supported languages)
• .PL - Poland (more information)
• .SH - Saint Helena (IDN Policy)
• .TV - Tuvalu (nearly all languages and character sets - more information)
• .TW - Taiwan (Simplified or Traditional Chinese)
• .WS - Western Samoa

See our domain search with IDNs in action: