From today, European citizens, businesses and organisations can register .eu website names using characters from all 23 official languages of the European Union. This was made possible thanks to new EU rules adopted by the Commission in June 2009.

Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) are internet domain names that contain other characters in addition to the 26 characters of the Latin alphabet "a" to "z", digits "0" to "9" and "-". Until today, those registering domain names under .eu could only use this limited set of characters but now a whole range of different characters used in the various official languages of the EU can be registered.

The Commission decided that the European top level domain .eu should offer characters from all official EU languages. IDNs are a way to allow this. It will now be possible to register names using characters like "à", "ą", "ä", "ψ" or "д" under ".eu". EU citizens, businesses and organisations will be able to register domain names in non-Latin scripts, which is essential for languages such as Greek and Bulgarian. Also, Spanish and Basque speakers can register names with "ñ" while French, Portuguese and Catalan speakers can use "ç".

Multilingualism has been a very important aspect of .eu since registrations opened in 2006. The legal framework foresees for example that registration of .eu domain names and communication of decisions concerning registration should be possible in all official languages of the Community. It also provides for the registration of domain names in all the alphabetic characters of the official languages.

Background

.eu is Europe's top level domain, set up by the EU but operated by the private non- profit organisation, EURid. This consortium of Belgium, Czech, Italian, Swedish and Slovenian registries has started .eu operations in 2005.

To date there are more than 3 million .eu domain names. This means that since first opening up to all EU residents and organisations established in the EU in April 2006, “.eu” has succeeded in gaining public favour.