A multilingual Domain Name System allows users to use Domain Names in non-Unicode or ASCII encodings. An international DNS server (or iDNS server) receives multilingual DNS requests and converts them to a format that can be used in the conventional Domain Name System. When the iDNS server first receives a DNS request, it determines the encoding type of that request. It may do this by considering the bit string in the top-level domain (or other portion) of the Domain Name and matching that string against a list of known bit strings for known top-level domains of various encoding types. One entry in the list may be the bit string for ".com" in Chinese BIG5, for example. After the iDNS server identifies the encoding type of the Domain Name, it converts the encoding of the Domain Name to Unicode. It then translates the Unicode representation to an ASCII representation conforming to the universal DNS standard. This is then passed into a conventional Domain Name System, which recognizes the ASCII format Domain Name and returns the associated IP address.