Countries around the world may be able to register Internet domain names in their own languages from as early as next year.

The Internet& 039 s key agency for overseeing such affairs, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, said Monday that it had asked representatives from governments and operators of country-code domains to come up with a list of policy questions that must be resolved to introduce addresses that end in non-Latin scripts.

The move comes as an increasing number of non-English speaking countries have called for the introduction of non-Latin suffixes in Internet domain names. Last year, the Chinese government registered an Internet domain in Chinese.

So far, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters of the English alphabet, the ten numerals and the hyphen.