An IDN or Internationalised Domain Name is an Internet domain name which may include special characters which are not defined in the ASCII standard. These special characters include, in particular, accented characters (e.g. é, à) or umlauts (e.g. ü, ä), which are common in numerous European languages, including German and French, and characters which do not form part of the Latin alphabet, such as Cyrillic, Chinese or Arabic characters.
Certain registries already permit the use of non-ASCII characters for second level domain names. Since users' requirements around the world differ, not all registries include the same special characters on their list. Enquiries should therefore be made with the registry concerned as to which characters are permissible for registration of a domain name.
The use of non-ASCII characters is possible not only for the creation of a second level domain name but should also be possible for the creation of a new gTLD.