MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Thai and Urdu are the newest languages available on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers wikipages set up for the global testing of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

"Each new language made available means more users from around the world will be more naturally able to share their experiences as we test the technical impact of IDNs," said Tina Dam, Director of ICANN’s IDN Program. "The wikipages are also a great tool for people to learn — in their own language — about the work being done to make close to 100,000 characters from the languages of the world available for top level Internet addresses."

ICANN launched the wiki pages with the domain name "example.test" last October in the 11 languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. Since then, Hebrew and Amharic have been added.

The wikis allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language — one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

Thai is internationalized on the fourth level and can be accessed via the following links:

http://ไทย.idn.icann.org

http://xn--o3cw4h.idn.icann.org

http://th.idn.icann.org

Urdu uses the same script as Persian and can therefore also be accessed through the Persian .test TLD.

http://نمونہ.آزمایشی

http://xn--hhbbbh02d.xn--hgbk6aj7f53bba

http://اردو.idn.icann.org

http://xn--mgbqf7g.idn.icann.org

http://ur.idn.icann.org

More information, as well as links to all of the wikis, is available at http://idn.icann.org.

source: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-05jun08-en.htm