Unlike the World Series, which is inhabited largely by American (and one Canadian) baseball teams, the World Wide Web, is actually inhabited by people from lots of different countries. But since the Internet came online, it's domain name suffixes (.com, .net, etc.,) have been comprised of Latin letters.
Then at the end of last month, ICANN approved the new "Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process," making it possible to create Internet addresses that contained non-Latin characters. This means that the 100,000 or so other language characters that people use as part of their native tongue can now go online.
Looks like Egypt is making the first move. Today it announced that it was launching the world's first Internet language domain. It's suffix will be ".masr" written in the Arabic alphabet. Masr translates as ".Egypt".
This news reminded me that I have the slide show Top 10 Languages Used on the Internet. It was built in 2008, so I updated the numbers and am putting it out there again. Can you guess who made the list?
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