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Internationalized domain names (IDN)

About internationalized domain names (IDN)

IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Names and refers to domain names with characters that lie outside of the domain name system’s character set, which only covers the characters a-z, 0-9 and dash.

As early as 2003 it became possible to register .se domains with the characters å, ä, ö, é and ü.

In summer 2007, the characters that occur in the official Swedish minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli (Tornedalsfinska), Sami, Romany and Yiddish, were added. At the same time the characters of the other Nordic languages were made available for use in .se domains. Domain names with any of these characters are collectively called IDN domains (Internationalized Domain Names).

Click here for a complete character table covering all valid characters.

At present, there are more than 44,000 IDN domains registered with .SE. Just like with normal domain names, registration of internationalized domains is done through .SE’s registrars. registrar list

Converted in DNS

The domain name system (DNS) actually only supports the characters a-z, 0-9 and dash. To be able to handle other characters in DNS, a method for conversion is used to enable representation of the characters that occur in the internationalized domain names at .SE. With our conversion tool you can convert an IDN domain name to a domain name adapted to DNS and vice versa.

IDN in most web browsers

IDN has been able to be used in most web browsers for some time, while no complete solution exists to handle these characters in e-mail.

• Web browsers and other aids that work with IDN

Contacts for IDN

If you have any additional questions regarding IDN domains, please contact: Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder, phone: +46-8-452 35 00, anne-marie.eklund-lowinder@iis.se