Local websites now end with the '.hk' suffix, but a Chinese alternative '' will pop up on the internet early next year.
Following a technical leap last year by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), an international organisation that oversees domain names, Web addresses can be written entirely in non-Latin characters such as Chinese and Egyptian.
Egypt, Russia, Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan have applied to the body to get new suffixes in local languages. Approval was granted to Egypt and Russia earlier this year and if Hong Kong's application goes through as planned, domain names ending with the Chinese suffix will be approved in December. It will take a month or two before the new Web addresses can be registered, so the new suffix will be ready early next year.
The Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation, a non-profit body appointed by the government to manage the registration of websites ending with .hk, applied in November to bring in , which is a dot followed by the Chinese name of 'Hong Kong'.
About 185,000 Web addresses use the .hk suffix, chief executive Jonathan Shea Tat-on said. They can use the new suffix free of charge.
He expects about 30,000 of them to use the suffix.
A suffix in a local language is important because it can raise the ranking of websites in Web search results, Edmon Chung Wang-on, chief executive of Dot Asia said.