Japanese characters can now be used in registering Internet site addresses, U.S. Web technology developer i-DNS.net International Inc. said Thursday.
The company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said Japanese is one of 55 non-English languages that its technology supports for domain name registration, and that its technology is fully compatible with commonly used Internet browsers and the current so-called Domain Name System.
Korean, Chinese, Spanish, German, Arabic, Thai, Tamil, Hebrew and Yiddish are among the 55 compatible languages, i-DNS.net said.
Individuals, companies or organizations who register domain names can now use Japanese characters in place of the Roman alphabet, including for ".com," which would be replaced by the circular full-stop sign used in Japanese and the kanji for company, or "kaisha," according to the company.
Japanese uses three syllabaries -- kanji, hiragana and katakana.
The new service will make Internet access easier, for instance, for "young children and senior citizens, who up until now have not been able to access the Internet due to a lack of proficiency in English," the company said.
It will also free up domain registration capacity by allowing for the use of other languages. "The current English domain name space is saturated," the firm said.
The U.S. company will partner three Japanese firms -- ASCII Corp., Crayfish Corp. and InterQ Corp. -- for accepting registrations of Japanese Web addresses.
The three firms will begin registration services this month, i-DNS.net said. It aims to obtain 100,000 new Japanese domain name registrations by the end of this year.