The First Non-Latin Web Addresses Go Live
May 12th, 2010
It was a historic day for the web. On May 6th, the first Arabic language web addresses became available for public use.
It was the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that initiated the move towards opening up the World Wide Web to non-Latin languages. Finally, their efforts have borne fruit. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are among the countries that made requests for Arabic top-level domains six months ago, and they were the first to receive their own native language top-level domains.
Arabic is the seventh-most used language on the internet, with over 60 million Arabic speakers online. That said, this still represents a very small penetration rate, at only three percent of the world’s 344 million Arabic speakers.
The change in URL script will allow URLs to be written right-to-left. This small change is likely to open doors that may once have been though impenetrable by non-Latin-based language speakers around the world.
