Kieren McCarthy's latest Guardian piece, 'How engineers tamed the internet's Tower of Babel,' looks at the complexities involved in creating the system of Punycode identifiers to represent the Unicode characters for a multitude of world languages.

New standards mean that all the world's languages can now finally be used on the world wide web.

At a United Nations meeting last month, a bespectacled Swede made a small, barely noticed announcement that nevertheless represented a pivotal moment in the history of the internet.

"Regarding the technical implementation for the world wide web, we are done," Patrik Fältström told the Internet Governance Forum. By "we are done", he meant that following a decade of hard work by a global consortium of engineers and linguists, they had finally decided on a document that will enable all the world's languages to be fully represented on the internet. People will be able to type in addresses in their own language, search in their own language and move around the internet in their own language.

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