The language of preference in the "original" Usenet hierarchies, including "alt.*", is English, which implies that the preferred character set encoding for these newsgroups is ASCII. Other language hierarchies have later been created in parallel to the existing English ones, for example "de.*" for German, "fr.*" for French, etc. Some access providers also created their own versions, prefixing the newsgroups names with their own name in a similar way. Messages posted in these "private" groups are generally not passed to other providers or the internet in general.