The world body controlling internet addresses agreed on Friday to allow countries to mark their territory not only with their own abbreviations, such as .uk or .fr, but with their own alphabets as well.

Icann’s willingness to add top-level country codes in Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic and Arabic characters ends a monopoly by Latin letters that has endured since the web’s beginning and limited its appeal. About half the internet’s users do not speak languages based on the Latin alphabet. They could still travel to much of the web by clicking on links compiled by search engines and other sites, but they have been far less likely to get to the site they had in mind when first logging on.