Internet addresses can be written in Arabic in the UAE by the end of April next year as Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) has applied for .emarat to be the top level domain name.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has started accepting applications from countries to assign country codes in non-Latin characters effective from November 16. Icann has recently approved the fast track internationalised domain name (IDN) implementation plan.

"Countries can now apply for new top level names that correspond to country name in one of its official languages. During this process Icann will evaluate the criteria before approving the application such as linguistic, technical and administrative matters. Following the application approval, there will be a separate delegation request to be submitted through Iana [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority]," TRA confirmed to Emirates Business.

"It is expected that the whole process will take about five months from now," it said in a statement.

The UAE has already applied for .emarat, the Arabic equivalent of the domain name .ae, to Icann to be the top level domain in Arabic at the time of application.

"We consider ourselves as one of the first to apply for an IDN ccTLD application to the Icann under the fast track process. There is a strong interest from the Arab countries on getting their domain name in Arabic. The UAE also went through the trial application process among only five countries globally that were invited during September 2009," said the authority.

TRA officials confirmed that the .ae domain administration (Da) has already upgraded its registry system to support registering Arabic domain names.

"We have seen an interest from registrars to become accredited registrars and it is worth mentioning that some of these companies who are interested to provide domain registration for their customers are international companies. In addition, .aeDa domain name system is capable of assigning Arabic domain names," TRA said. "Supporting Arabic domain names in the registry system is a significant change and the system has been tested to cater for mass registration and transaction processing."

This change happened after the use of internet addresses using scripts such as Hebrew, Hindi and Korean was approved by the Icann board at a meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

More than half the world's internet users do not use English or a Latin-based language as their first language and this move will see about 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs.

Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of Icann, a not-for-profit corporation which oversees internet addresses, said: "The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.

"Right now, internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the fast track process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

Rod Beckstrom, Icann's President and Chief Executive, added: "This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move towards the internationalisation of the internet.

"The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs in the domain name system, but they also be helping to bring the first of billions more people online – people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives."

Egypt was the first one to apply for the first internet domain written in Arabic. The new domain pronounced as .masr made it the first Arab nation to apply for a non-Latin character domain.

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