A new way of typing internet addresses has been approved, described as the net's "biggest technical change" since it was created 40 years ago.

The organisation that oversees them has backed the use of non-Latin characters from languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.

Up to now, top-level domains (TLDs - the end of web addresses like .com and .co.uk) have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English (A-Z) as well as 10 numbers and the hyphen.

That has meant internet users with little or no knowledge of English may still have to type in Latin characters to access their country's web pages.

But now, web addresses using characters from different languages will be available by mid-2010.

Their use has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board at a meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet address endings reflecting their name and using their national language from November 16, when ICANN's Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) fast track process begins.

If the applications meet certain criteria, including government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations for domain names.

More than half the world's internet users do not use English or a Latin-based language as their first language and this move will see around 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs.

The internet's roots are traced to experiments at US universities in 1969 but it was not until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public.

Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN, said: "The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago."

Joe White of Gandi.net, which provides internet services based on domain names, said: "This first wave of applicants will give an early indication as to how the structure of the internet might evolve by giving a glimpse of which new TLDs might arrive first.

"It will prompt businesses to start thinking about how to adapt their strategy, whether they want to run their own TLD or register a domain within a new TLD such as .lawyer.

"Consumers will start to form opinions on whether they trust the new TLDs any more, whether they see any value in them, and whether it's really as exciting as ICANN thinks it will be."