The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, has called for the internet to accommodate the Cyrillic alphabet as part of a drive to highlight the importance of the Russian language.

The Kremlin is concerned that Russian, which was once spoken throughout the Soviet Union, may be losing ground to local languages. Russian is also suffering from the growing creep of English, particularly on the web.

Mr Medvedev said that making the web more Russian-friendly would help to restore the language's global profile. More than 300 million people worldwide used Russian media, he said, adding that he would make the ability to write web addresses in the Cyrillic alphabet a personal priority.

"We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name," Mr Medvedev told the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow. "It is a pretty serious thing.

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"It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic and it is not a bad sphere of co-operation. And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision in the Internet world."

Web pages themselves have long been able to incorporate foreign scripts, but the internet address or 'domain name' which appears in the URL line has always had to be written in the roman alphabet. Russian pages have typically been designated by the code '.ru'.

ICANN, the body which oversees internet addresses, is currently trialling a system which would allow domain names to be written in 15 languages - including Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Japanese - but has given no guidance on when it will be implemented.

Mr Medvedev has often sought to portray himself as a technologically savvy head of state, and has said, for instance, that he surfs the web for news every morning. He has even been known to use his mobile phone to connect to the internet.

Russian is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin, English, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic and Spanish. According to the Dictionary of Languages, there are an estimated 175 million people who speak it, mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, and other former Soviet states.

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