Starting next week, ICANN (the group in-charge of domain names) will begin testing non-English IP domain names, enabling vernacular netizens around the world to create their own Web pages and addresses.

Presently, 11 domain names, including in Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil have been listed to go through the test to be conducted by ICANN.

Chosen on the basis of interests expressed by online communities, these domain names will be given to software developers and Web site designers across the globe for testing purposes.

Testing will be done using Punycode software that translates languages into Latin- alphabetic and numeric codes that can be understood by root servers which act as Internet traffic cops.

Until now, domain names have been limited to the English language. Though sometimes it is possible to have domain names in vernacular languages, these have to end with .com, which is essentially in English.

The test will check on the possibility of creating Web addresses that end even with non-English.

If the test results are positive, netizens can expect these regional domain names to come into force by the end of next year.