Public Interest Registry—the not-for-profit operator of the .org domain—today announced the general availability of three new Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) which translate to “organisation” or “institution” in non-Latin-based scripts—one in Devanagari, one in Cyrillic, and one in simplified Chinese. Previously only available to qualified domain trademark holders, all interested companies, organisations and individuals can now register for the new domains.

With these new IDNs serving as useful branding tools, the domains will enable website owners to brand their addresses in native scripts, ultimately making the Internet more user-friendly and encouraging heightened communication.

“Our mission at Public Interest Registry has always been to help organisations maximize their audience reach and better communicate their missions, activities and accomplishments. The launch of these new international domain names speaks to the heart of that mission,” said Brian Cute, CEO of Public Interest Registry. “Now, organisations of all sizes will have the opportunity to brand their website addresses in localized scripts, ensuring that their causes and passions resonate on regional and global levels.”

Currently, there are approximately:

• 143.5 million people in Russia using Russian Cyrillic as the official alphabet for their national language
• 497 million people speaking Hindi as a first language and 120 million as a second language.
• 1.4 billion people speaking and writing in some form of Chinese.

In recent years, Public Interest Registry has emerged at the forefront of support for use of alternative scripts, having worked closely with standards-setting bodies and members of the engineering community to create and launch a number of alternative scripts for second-level names associated with .org. To date, the registrar supports 11 IDNs available for user adoption with .org in languages that include Danish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish, among others.

For more information about Public Interest Registry or for the full list of registrars offering the new IDNs, visit www.pir.org.