Its often said that the world is colorful. As the internet is growing at an alarming rate, internet companies are adding many languages to their websites to increase the usage and traffic of their websites locally across the globe. India, the largest democratic country has more than 1 billion people speaking across the 1000 languages that it exhibits.

“Global MNC’s like BBC and Google are forging ahead to make sure that they capitalize on the opportunity that India promises with a smile.”

While Google has made orkut very versatile indeed by adding the feature of transliteration of texts in local languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and other Indian languages, BBC has developed a site especially for Urdu readers which is known as BBCUrdu.com and has become very popular. Moreover, BBCUrdu .com just launched an initiative which would attract a lot of Indian citizens for journalism online from the leading Indian universities.

Fropper.com, the social networking site, has plans to expand its operations in the regional market as well to increase its viability amongst users of different languages.

Navin Mittal, the Business Head at Fropper.com says:

“Fropper.com has plans to facilitate creation and exchange of user-generated content in the top six-eight regional languages in the coming six months, where it will provide tools to write and thus, users will be able to interact fully.”

While only 19% of the worlds global population uses the internet, the other 81% of the worlds market is still untapped because of the language barrier. As more and more portals are increasingly adding different language versions, they are creating a strategy to tap the huge potential that the untapped market holds for them.

“However, according to reports from the Internet Metrics Firm ‘JuxtConsult‘ the reality is that only 3 million people read online in vernacular languages as of today, the vernacular market still holds a very good opportunity.”

While even the blogging sphere is growing, many bloggers have begun writing in regional languages to voice their opinions on regional issues and activities. One such blogger is Shashi Singh who is the co-founder - PodBharti, an Indian podcasting site. Shashi has launched a Hindi language blog mumbaiblogs.lokmanch.com through which he communicates his views on ‘contemporary social issues’ and receives as many as 3000 visitors to his blog each month. As Shashi Singh says:

“Hindi blogs are growing very fast. There are over 1,000 bloggers who write in Hindi, but this figure was limited to 50 three years back,”

Apart from social networking sites, Shashi Singh is a classic example of how even bloggers are gearing up to converse in regional languages. There are a lot of other classic examples of big MNC’s going globally local such as:

- Microsoft launching Windows Vista in many Indian languages.

- Yahoo offering messenger and chat facilities in Indian languages through IndiChat.

- IndyaRocks.com is planning to expand its operation into regional social networking.

- Webdunia.com recently launched its site in nine Indian languages and is soon going to open a ‘blog section’ in nine Indian languages by the end of October 2007. Moreover, webdunia provides local regional content to MSN and Yahoo! and is under talks right now with Google for the same.

Cyber space is growing rapidly and the need of the hour is to get a lot of people to start using the internet as a medium of communication, information and entertainment. The block remains wherein most of the world’s population is not fluent in the mainstream language of the internet which is English, companies such as Google and Microsoft have understood and realized that they require to motivate even the local villager in their own mother tongue to enable them to use the internet. Thus, the diversification of portals into different regional languages is justified and is sooner or later to take place on a huge scale within the internet space.
Source: AgencyFAQ’s

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