The Internet is bracing itself for a “historic“ change. Or, at least, that’s what the ICANN, the global authority on Internet domain names, calls it. The first country code domain names using non-Latin characters are now live, the organization has announced. The IDN ccTLDs (internationalized domain name country code top level domains) are now available for three countries, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live!,” the ICANN announced on its blog.

“If your software does not have full IDN support, this might not work exactly as expected. You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of ‘xn--’s mixed into the address bar. Or it may not work at all,” the announcement added.

The TLDs that are now live are السعودية. (“Al-Saudiah”), امارات. (“Emarat”) and مصر. (“Misr”). You’ll notice that, because Arab is a right-to-left language, the trailing dot is on the right of the text and the domain suffix will be to the left of the domain name. Here’s one website that uses the new domain name that is live now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر .

Unfortunately, the new domain names may not work properly on most computers. When the URL is resolved, the characters will be transformed into Latin ones and the whole thing will look rather alien. This should change in the future when operating systems and browsers implement full support for IDNs out of the box.

ICANN says 21 countries have applied for a localized TLD in a total of 11 different languages. With over half the users around the world utilizing a language with a non-Latin alphabet, the need for IDNs was definitely there. For now, website owners in those three countries will be able to apply for a domain name with the new TLDs. New IDNs will be made available for various other countries, but the process is still in its infancy.