Starting on November 16, 2009, ICANN has begun to accept requests from representatives of countries and territories around the world for new Internet extensions that represent their country name and are made up of non-Roman characters.

ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush noted, “The IDN program will encompass close to one hundred thousand characters, opening up the Internet to billions of potential users around the globe.”

ICANN President Rod Beckstrom described the importance of this change to the global Internet community, “Over half the Internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language. IDNs are about making the Internet more global and accessible for everyone.”

These Internet extensions are expected to come online in many countries during 2010.

The FAQ section is a must read as it is quite detailed (link here).

ICANN addresses aliasing here.

And Tina Dam beautifully explains the potential of IDN.IDNs here for many who faced a previously unscalable language barrier on the Internet.