The short result : Web addresses are in English because the masses who develop the standards for web address were , for the most part , English - speaking Americans .

The longer answer : In the earlier days of the internet , the only way to unite with a remote computer was to provide its uniqueIP address , a long drawing string of digit such as 165.254.202.218 . But in 1983 , as the number of computers on the web continued to grow , the University of Wisconsin developed theDomain Name System ( DNS ) , which maps numeric IP address to more easily call up area names like howstuffworks.com .

In 1990 , British scientist ( and English speaker unit ) Tim Berners - Lee invent theWorld all-embracing entanglement , and by 1992 , more than one million information processing system were colligate , most of them in the United States [ source : Computer History Museum ] . In 1994 , the Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF ) , a standards organization made up of representatives from several U.S. government agencies , published a Seth of standards for web addresses , which it called Uniform Resource Locators , or URLs [ sources : Berners - Lee , Internet Society , Ishida ] .

To make vane addresses easy to read , compose , case and call back , the IETF restrict URLs to a little turn of character , namely the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English ( or Latin ) rudiment , the finger’s breadth 0 through 9 and a few symbols [ generator : Berners - Lee ] . The permissible fictitious character are based on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better know as theUS - ASCII graphic symbol readiness , which was developed in the United States and first write in 1963 .

This all work out finely for English - speaking country , but as of 2009 , more than half of the 1.6 billion internet exploiter worldwide spoke a spoken communication with a character set other than the English ( or Latin ) ABC [ source : Whitney ] . To sympathize what using the web is like for those individuals , imagine that you have to navigate the web using only Arabic . The content on your preferred sites is still in English , but the World Wide Web speech for every site you use is made up of completely unfamiliar characters that may not even be found on your keyboard [ rootage : Ishida ] . That scenario , in contrary , is essentially what the net experience has been like for web user who record and write using not only another words , but an entirely different first rudiment or set of characters . ( Visit a website like Egypt ’s el-balad.com , for object lesson , and the differentiation between the site content , which is entirely in Arabic , and the vane speech , which apply only English characters , becomes immediately clear . )

yield the growing number of non - English drug user online , it may come as no surprisal that English web addresses are no longer the law of the land . In 2009 , ICANN , the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that regulates domain name on the internet , approve the use of Internationalized Domain Names ( IDNs ) , meaning that World Wide Web addresses would be capable to control non - English theatrical role like Formosan , Korean , Arabic or Cyrillic hand [ sources : Arthur , ICANN ] .

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