Global: The Internet goes multilingual

The challenges for Africa and African diasporas

On October 30, the internet opened a new chapter in its long march towards internationalization. It entered a new era of multilingual globalization. Up to now, web addresses could only be displayed using Latin characters. This increasingly makes little sense as more than half of the world's 1.6 billion internet users employ non-Latin scripts including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and Russian.