Russian President called for Russia to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language. Russian, once the main language throughout the Soviet Union, is losing ground to local languages and also to the English language. Defending Russian is a matter of national pride.

Medvedev said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and has made it a personal priority to raise the importance of Russian as a language; a key part of this would be a Cyrillic domain name. He was quoted in saying “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name—it is a pretty serious thing,” Medvedev told the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow. He goes on to say “It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic and it is not a bad sphere of cooperation. And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision in the Internet world.”

Medvedev has portrayed himself as Internet-savvy; publicly using his mobile telephone to connect to the Internet and saying he surfs online every morning for news.

Russian Internet sites use domain names in the Latin script, as in most parts of the Internet. Addresses end either with the suffix .ru, or in some cases .su, a domain name inherited from the Soviet Union.

Industry experts say Russia wants its domain name to be .rf—for Russian Federation—but written in the Cyrillic script.

Raised concerns have been brought up by some in the industry that it could allow the state to control more of the content in a sphere that has remained a relatively free forum for dissent at a time when traditional media have become subject to tighter control.

Russian is one of the the sixth most widely spoken languages in the world after Mandarin, English, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic and Spanish. It is also one of the United Nations’ six main languages.