Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of International domain names or addresses that can be written in non-Latin script.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit group that oversees domain names, is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, email address and Twitter post, such as ‘.com’ and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN’s board is whether to allow for the first time entire internet addresses to be in scripts not based on Latin letters. That could open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic in which Russian is written.

This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago. If the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.