Singapore getting ready to launch Tamil and Chinese IDN's

Singapore announced the launch of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs). The launch will take place in the following phases:Sunrise Phase -1, 4 July 11 – 15 August 11,Sunrise Phase- 2, 12 September 11 – 8 November 11,General Launch- 14, December 11 onwards.This would enable URL typing in Chinese and Tamil once it becomes operational.Registrations of IDNs can be made with any of SGNIC’s participating accredited registrars and will only be available at the 2nd level i.e. “.新加坡” and “.சிங்கப்பூர்” which represent “Singapore” in the Chinese and Tamil languages respectively.Applications during the Sunrise Phases will be batch-processed while applications for the General Launch will be on a first-come-first-served basis .

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are second- and third-level domain names or web addresses, represented by local language characters.The native language domain name is followed by the Latin script top-level domain (TLD) such as .com or .net.IDNs improve the accessibility and functionality of the Internet by enabling domain names in non-ASCII characters.IDNs have the potential to transform the Internet into a truly global and multilingual tool by enabling Internet users to navigate and communicate online in their preferred script.You can use these applications to navigate the Internet, send email, and ftp in your native-language script. IDNs may be registered in any character set or script identified in Unicode5.2.Following Indianlanguages are covered by unicode Bengali Devanagiri Gujarati Gurmukhi Kannada Malayalam Oriya Saurashtra Tamil and Telugu.If everything goes well as planned, India will be ready to have internationalised domain names (IDN) on the internet in seven Indian languages — Hindi, Bangla, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati — by the year end .