The International Telecommunication Union, UNESCO and ICANN will collaborate on global efforts to forge universal standards towards building a multilingual cyberspace. The three agencies organized a workshop on this subject during the second Internet Governance Forum (IGF) taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 12 to 15 November 2007.

The Internet is a key factor in developing a more inclusive and development-oriented information society, which stresses plurality and diversity instead of global uniformity. Multilingualism is a key concept to ensure cultural diversity and participation for all linguistic groups in cyberspace. There is growing concern that hundreds of local languages may be sidestepped, albeit unintentionally in the radical expansion of Internet communication and information. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) recognized the importance attached to linguistic diversity and local content, with UNESCO given the responsibility to coordinate implementation of the Summit Action Line.

"The discussions at this multilingualism workshop — combined with our current evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names — are going to help ICANN keep moving toward full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names," said Mr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. "ICANN is in the midst of the largest ever evaluation of IDNs at the top level."

Following the evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names by ICANN, Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name "example.test" in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own sub pages with their own names in their own language; one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

Domain Names, which are currently mainly limited to characters from the Latin or Roman scripts, are seen as an important element in enabling the multilingualization of the Internet, reflecting the diverse and growing language needs of all users.