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Press Release: Internet Access: UNESCO and ICANN Join Forces to Improve Linguistic Diversity Online

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PARIS and LOS ANGELES – 27 February 2025 – 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.

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. This agreement improving linguistic diversity represents an important step towards achieving the goal of an Internet accessible to all," said Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO.

"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 that 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, often 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.

About UNESCO

With 194 Member States, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization contributes to peace and security by leading multilateral cooperation on education, science, culture, communication and information. Headquartered in Paris, UNESCO has offices in 54 countries and employs over 2300 people. UNESCO oversees more than 2000 World Heritage sites, Biosphere Reserves and Global Geoparks; networks of Creative, Learning, Inclusive and Sustainable Cities; and over 13 000 associated schools, university chairs, training and research institutions. Its Director-General is Audrey Azoulay.

"Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed" – UNESCO Constitution, 1945.

More information: www.unesco.org

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a nonprofit public benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.

Media Contacts

Clare O'Hagan, UNESCO
c.o-hagan@unesco.org

Gwen Carlson, ICANN
gwen.carlson@icann.org

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."