By 
UNESCO and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are announcing a new agreement to enhance linguistic diversity in the digital world. This will make the Internet more accessible to hundreds of millions of users.
RELATED: UNESCO launches 2025 Year of Quantum Science & Technology
Under this new agreement, UNESCO and ICANN will cooperate to support the secure use of additional scripts and languages in the Internet’s domain name system (DNS), encompassing the domain names and email addresses that are key for access and online communication. The two organizations also will work together to drive the Universal Acceptance (UA) of all domain names and email addresses, regardless of character length, language, or script, in all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems.
“In an increasingly digital world, it is essential to facilitate people’s access to the Internet. But today, there are only around 400 languages fully accessible online, representing just a fraction of the world’s 7,000 spoken languages, said Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO.
” This agreement improving linguistic diversity represents an important step towards achieving the goal of an Internet accessible to all.”
“We look forward to working with UNESCO to bridge digital divides and connect communities,”’ said Kurtis Lindqvist, President and CEO of ICANN.
“Supporting domain names in local scripts and language, and their Universal Acceptance, is essential to enabling a diverse and multilingual online experience. This collaboration with UNESCO reaffirms our goal of one world, one Internet.”
Connecting the next billion people
Today more than 5.4 billion people regularly use the Internet, yet another 2.6 billion users are still to come online. Most of these current and potential users communicate in their local languages and scripts. Domain names that use various languages and scripts, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), will help ensure that everyone has the ability to experience the full social and economic power of the Internet. IDNs allow Internet users to choose the domain name and email address in the language and script that best suits their needs and culture.
Universal Acceptance is necessary to ensure that all of these domain names and email addresses work seamlessly on the Internet. However, many of the checks used by many software applications to validate domain names and email addresses often use rules created many years ago, which do not support all domain names, especially those in local languages and scripts. Organizations and stakeholders need to take steps to ensure their systems are UA-ready to enjoy these benefits.
Increasing the number of domain name scripts and languages
IDNs are essential to promoting linguistic diversity. Only 10 percent of the top 1,000 websites can currently accept IDNs. Further only, 22 percent of global email services under generic top-level domains support email addresses in local languages.
This new partnership will enable UNESCO and ICANN to contribute directly to increasing the number of scripts supported in the DNS securely, and promote the UA-readiness of applications and systems for global users. UNESCO and ICANN also teamed to support and encourage Internet inclusivity through global Universal Acceptance Day events to increase awareness and adoption of all domain names in the DNS and their corresponding email address.
This initiative will be based in particular on the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, which calls on Member States to reduce language barriers on the Internet by putting in place specific policies, and pays particular attention to the need for multilingual domain names.
