To date, there have been 33 internationalized domain name (IDN) requests across 22 languages.
Most recently, India and Korea passed the string evaluation stage with their IDNs. I’ve updated my IDN page to include these new domains.
India is particularly fascinating. There are no fewer than seven scripts used to represent the IDN equivalent of .in (India/Bharat).
Bulgaria had submitted this domain — .бг — but ICANN rejected it, saying it was confusingly similar to Brazil ccTLD: .br.
I’m with Bulgaria on this one.
Finally, efforts are underway to offer IDN equivalents of the .asia domain. Like India, there will need to be a range of language-specific IDNs available, which makes such a launch rather challenging. But I’m told that early stage registrations could begin by the end of this year.