After receiving approval in January, .Tel’s Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) registration goes live. The request to offer the IDN registrations was approved by ICANN in January. The Registry began accepting registrations for these domain names in the following languages:
- Traditional and Simplified Chinese
- Danish
- Finnish
- German
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
IDN’s allow users to register their .tel domain name in their native language and character set. However, all domains must still have the requisite .tel typed at the end of the domain as the non-Latin letters, or internationalized part of the domain, only pertains to the second level domain name.
According to Telnic’s Justin Hayward, the first .tel IDN name to be registered ärzte.tel, which translates to doctors.tel.