SEOUL -- The World Wide Web is about to start using the languages of the world.
Leaders of the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet are expected to decide here Friday to let Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet -- an issue for the majority of Internet users who use other alphabets in their native language. Already, portions of a Web address can be written in other languages. But the suffix, such as the "com" after the dot, must be typed in Roman letters.
The change will allow the suffix -- known as a top-level domain -- to be expressed in about 16 other alphabets. They include traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew. Dozens of other alphabets are likely to be added in coming years.
Digits
That means computer users will be able to type or input a full Web address without the need for Roman letters. Web-site designers will be able to use a consistent character set on a Web page without, for instance, having to switch to Roman letters to portray a link to another page.
Authorities who oversee top-level domains in their home countries could begin accepting applications next month.
Making it happen has taken six years of discussion by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, and technical work by the Internet Engineering Task Force, both California-based independent nonprofit organizations that endeavor to preserve the universality of the data network, which got started as an offshoot of a U.S. military network in the 1960s.
"The statistics show that over half of the users of the Internet today don't use the Roman alphabet in their first language," says Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of Icann. "It's an issue of national pride in some cases and cultural identity."
Several hundred Icann directors and advisers -- an international group -- are meeting in Seoul this week to wrestle with technical issues. The thorniest is what to do with characters that look the same but mean something different, which is particularly difficult with Chinese, the language that may someday be one of the most heavily used for Internet addresses.
"The program is very likely to get approved as a whole," Mr. Beckstrom says. "There are simply details that are being negotiated."
In China, Web sites generally use Roman letters to spell out Chinese words in the Hanyu Pinyin system, the Western alphabet transliteration of Chinese characters. But the system has also led to some domain names that are a series of numbers that rhyme with Chinese words.
Peter Lu, managing director of China IntelliConsulting, said the change will boost Web use in China. Switching from Chinese characters at the start of an address to Roman characters for the ".com" or the ".gov" is cumbersome.
But he added that it would have made a bigger difference 10 years ago when Internet usage was starting out in the country. "Now, more and more Chinese know English, or at least are used to using Pinyin as a substitute," he said.
Elsewhere, the importance of the change in Web addresses depends on how much people type out an address versus finding it from a search engine or portal service. South Korean Web users, for instance, rely heavily on two portal companies that allow Korean-language searches and present not just Web sites but news, videos and other content from a single request.
"I think the decision is unlikely to bring about huge changes for users," says Lee Wang-sang, an Internet analyst at Woori Securities in Seoul. "But there will be some competition between companies to obtain popular Korean words for addresses."
—Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article.Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com
