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Long-dominated by English, the language of its founders, the Internet is about to take a big step toward becoming a truly world-wide Web.

Starting on Monday, Web surfers will be able to test Internet addresses in 11 languages that don't use the Roman alphabet -- the 26 letters used in English and most other European languages.

The development means the domain-name suffix, the part of a Web address after the dot -- such as "com" or "org" -- could now be in a language like Japanese or Hindi. Until now, that part of the address had to use the Roman alphabet under the Internet's system of addresses, overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a private, nonprofit organization. The change follows Icann's decision in 2003 to allow the part of a domain name preceding the dot, called the secondary-level domain name, to be in a language that uses a non-Roman alphabet.
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Russians, for example, will be able to type Web addresses entirely in the Cyrillic characters used in Russian language -- instead of having to revert to English for the last part. The change also involves languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Korean, spoken by billions of people many of whom aren't yet Internet users.

"There are a billion people on the Internet, which means there are five billion not on it," said Paul Hoffman, a Santa Cruz, Calif.-based programmer who created the standards behind the so-called internationalized domain names. The new names "are not for the current users, but for the next billion."

Web users in non-Roman language countries have typically needed keyboards that could type in both Roman and local characters to access the Internet. China uses a Roman-alphabet equivalent, called pinyin, which is then converted into Chinese characters.

English-speaking users with Western-style keyboards won't be able to type the non-Roman domain names directly into a Web browser. Instead, they will be able to access the new domain names by clicking on links from search engines or other Web sites.

The question of international domain suffixes has been loaded with geopolitical tension. Internet users outside the U.S. in recent years have clamored for the right to have domain names in their own language. They argue their Internet culture and usage are hindered by the requirement to learn English.
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The issue fanned broader discontent that the key architecture of the Internet, called the domain name system, is overseen by one country, the U.S. Icann is based in Marina del Rey, Calif., and reports to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Icann, which the U.S. government created in 1998, approves new domain-name suffixes, among other technical matters.

The criticism came to a head two years ago at a United Nations summit, when the U.S. government fought off demands from more than 170 countries to give up its unilateral oversight of the domain-name system.

Icann agreed to pursue internationalized domain names as early as 2000. But progress was slow, due to technical considerations and bureaucratic delays in trying to coordinate so many entities in different countries. Some critics of the process said that since Icann is based in the U.S. it wasn't a priority.

Having lost their patience, some countries, most notably China, South Korea and some Arabic-speaking nations, as well as private entities in Europe, have created domain names in their own languages, using non-Roman letters, independent of Icann. These separate systems, known as alternative roots, can create online confusion, with duplicated domain names or multiple addresses for the same sites.

"The Arab countries don't want alternative roots," said Baher Esmat, a former official in Egypt's ministry of communication and information technology and now a Cairo-based representative of Icann. "We just want our country codes in the Arabic language -- if that happens, then there is no reason to continue" with the alternative roots, he said. Country code refers to the domain name assigned to each country, such as dot-uk for Britain.

In Egypt, about seven million people, or 10% of the population, use the Internet, according to Mr. Esmat. Most of the users are well-educated and speak at least some English. To get the next 10% of the population online, however, having domain names in Arabic is critical, he said. The Egyptian government is moving ahead with various e-government initiatives, such as online applications for driver's licenses, that likely would catch on only if the Web sites were entirely in Arabic, he said.

"The potential users are not able to use the Internet unless it's in their native language," said Mr. Esmat.

Some critics argue that enabling the growth of languages on the Web, in particular those that don't use the Roman alphabet, in itself amounts to fragmenting the Internet, since it encourages regional use around a local language rather than global interaction based on a popular language like English.

"Theoretically all pilots speak English when trying to land a plane," said Paul Mockapetris, who invented the domain-name system in the early 1980s. The internationalized domain names are "a huge opportunity for balkanizing the Internet or uniting it -- we'll know which way it goes in about 10 years."

The domain-name system that Mr. Mockapetris designed and that is still in use today allows Internet addresses limited to 37 characters, known as ASCII, consisting of the numbers zero to nine, the 26 letters of the alphabet and the hyphen. The Internet stems from work done in the 1960s and 1970s funded by the U.S. Department of Defense largely for military purposes.

Now, as the Internet grows beyond its U.S. origins, myriad technical and policy questions about how other languages will actually work in domain names are cropping up.

India, for example, has several dozen major dialects, raising the question of which one should be used for its country code in Hindi. It's not clear who would make that decision. Concerns also exist about people using characters from other languages to dupe users with bogus Web sites, a practice called phishing. Scammers have already used the Russian cyrillic 'A' to make a fake Paypal Web site. Since Arabic is spoken in multiple countries, it remains to be determined what entity decides how that domain-name suffix would be handled. Unlike in the U.S., where domain names are bought and sold on the open market, in most of these countries likely to use the new domain suffixes, governments manage and parcel out the domain names.

"This is the first time we will see fully localized domain names," said Tina Dam, the Icann official heading up the project. "We still have to make sure that things will be secure and stable -- that's why we're testing it to make sure it works."

Companies that sell domain names -- both the wholesale registries and the retail registrars -- expect a windfall once the names are approved. Domain names are booming, growing by 31% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to VeriSign Inc., a registry that manages dot-com and dot-net. The bulk of that growth comes from country-code domain names, such as China's dot-cn, which more than quadrupled from a year ago.

NeuStar Inc., which manages dot-biz, said its business in non-English domain names has grown by more than 1,000% from last year, with much of that growth in South Korea. English is still used by 31% of all Internet users, but other languages are growing rapidly online. Chinese, now No. 2 online as the language of 16% of users, has grown nearly fivefold during the past seven years, according to internetworldstats.com.

The other non-Roman languages included in the test are Persian, Greek, Yiddish, Tamil and simplified Chinese. Icann says the languages were chosen based on the interest expressed by the various countries.

On Monday, Icann will post links on its Web site, www.icann.org, to test sites in 11 non-Roman languages. Users can click on the links to visit the test sites, leave comments about them and create their own versions of Web pages that use the non-Roman suffixes. Icann expects working addresses in the new languages to be available by the end of next year.

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