Web addresses to become multilingual

The nonprofit body that oversees internet addresses has approved the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts, in a decision that could make the web dramatically more inclusive.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - voted on Friday to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a week-long meeting in Seoul, South Korea's capital.

The decision follows years of debate and testing.

The decision clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, probably from November 16.

Internet users could start seeing these in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

"This is absolutely delightful news," said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an internet research and consulting firm in Beijing, emphasising that the internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education.

Domain names - the internet addresses that end in ".com" and other suffixes - are the key monikers behind every website, email address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English - A-Z - as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.