You can register a domain name with accented letters, or other linguistic symbols that are present in your native language (except for ”&” and ”@”). For example: société.com, società.com, compañías.com.

More than the standard characters (letters, numbers and hyphens), the IDN system can use the specific characters of more than 350 different languages (French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, …).

The domain name is said to be thus, “international” or “IDN” (for Internationalized Domain Names, or even Localized or Multilingual domain name).

You can register your internationalized domain name with Gandi, you just need to specify the corresponding native language. IDNs use recent technology, though one that does not replace the existing global DNS infrastructure. So that the domain name can be resolved on the internet, it is thus the client's system that must be adapted to be IDN compatible, whatever the platform used. As a result, web browsers, e-mail clients, chat programs, and file transfer programs must all be made compatible with this system.

Certain navigators do not need to be updated, such as recent versions of Mozilla.

For Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is necessary to install a plug-in. This may be downloaded for free at VeriSign's website.

The IDN system is outlined in the RFC 3490, 3491, and 3492 standards; Proposed Standard.

Technically speaking, the special character is coded as described via a conversion chart. That's why an IDN always begins with these 4 characters: “xn–”. For example, bébé.com will become xn–bb-bjab.com.

See Internationalized Domain Names for more information.