Why are Web addresses in English?

Have you ever sat wondering how and why a web address is in English? Well we here at The Computer Guyz have asked and answered that exact question for you. The world is full of different languages and writing styles. No one language is the same as another. The most commonly spoken language in the world is Mandarin with over 1 billion speakers and only second is English with 508 million, so why is the web address in English?

Basically web addresses are in English because the people who developed the standards for web addresses were, for the most part, English-speaking Americans.

For those who need more information than that, let’s go back to the beginning. In the early days of the Internet, you would have to type a long string of digits (unique IP address) just to connect to a remote computer. However in 1983, the number of computers on a network was continuing to grow. The Domain Name System (DNS) was developed by the University of Wisconsin, which mapped numeric IP addresses to a more easily remembered domain name like tcgcape.co.za.

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee (English speaker) invented the World Wide Web (www), and by 1992 more than 1 million computer were connected, most of them in the United states. In 1994 a set of standards were published for the Web addresses called URL (Uniform Resource Locators) by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).

To make Web addresses easy to write, read, type and remember; the IETF restricted URLs to a small number of characters namely the upper and lowercase letter of the English (Latin) alphabet, the digits 0 – 9 and a few symbols. However since 2009, ICANN, the U.S. based non-profit organisation that regulates domain names on the Internet, approved the use of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names), meaning that Web addresses would be able to contain non-English characters like Korean, Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic scripts.

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