Buzz
Although English isn't spoken everywhere, those who have internet access generally know how to navigate the web.
Gajus/ThinkstockIn short: Web addresses are in English because the developers who established the standards for them were predominantly English-speaking Americans.
To elaborate: In the early days of the internet, the only way to connect to a remote machine was by using its unique IP address, a series of numbers like 165.254.202.218. However, in 1983, the University of Wisconsin introduced the Domain Name System (DNS), which linked numerical IP addresses to easier-to-remember domain names like Mytour.com.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist and English speaker, created the World Wide Web. By 1992, over a million computers were connected, most of them in the U.S. [source: Computer History Museum]. In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards group with representatives from several U.S. government agencies, issued a set of standards for web addresses, calling them Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs [sources: Berners-Lee, Internet Society, Ishida].
To simplify web addresses, the IETF limited URLs to a small set of characters: the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English (or Latin) alphabet, the digits 0 through 9, and a few symbols [source: Berners-Lee]. These characters were based on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or US-ASCII character set, which was developed and first published in the U.S. in 1963.
This worked well for English-speaking nations, but by 2009, over half of the 1.6 billion global internet users spoke languages with character sets different from the English (or Latin) alphabet [source: Whitney]. Imagine navigating the web using only Arabic. Your favorite sites' content is still in English, but every web address is made up of unfamiliar characters, some of which might not even appear on your keyboard [source: Ishida]. This was the experience for users reading and writing with different alphabets or character sets. For instance, visit Egypt's el-balad.com, and you'll immediately notice the contrast between the Arabic content and the English-only web address.
With the rise of non-English internet users, it's no surprise that English-only web addresses are no longer standard. In 2009, ICANN, the U.S.-based nonprofit that governs domain names, approved Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), allowing web addresses to incorporate non-English characters such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic, or Cyrillic scripts [sources: Arthur, ICANN].
