We are lately seeing a lot many sites taking interest in developing the pages in vernacular languages. E-commerce websites are also launching apps in vernacular languages, and the existing ones are adding up more languages.
Just yesterday MakeMyTrip launched train-booking app supporting 5 languages. Everyone is keen on catering to the masses in remote villages, and so is Google. They’re launching Google maps and other products in Hindi, as it being the national language spoken in a larger section in the country, 21% Indians prefer to access Internet in Hindi.
“While there are an estimated 500 million speakers of Hindi, there are just 100,000 Wikipedia articles. India’s Internet population is growing really fast, from 100 million users in 2011, we are now the world’s second largest Internet base with 300 million users and we are well-poised to touch 500 million base by 2017,” Google India Marketing Director Sandeep Menon told PTI. “Hindi content consumption on the web is starting to take off. It has grown 94 per cent year-on-year compared to 19 per cent growth for English content,” Menon said.
It’s a well-known fact that this growth in India has come from nowhere but mobile phones. It has reached places afar and hence the consumption for Hindi content has grown a whopping 94 per cent year-on-year compared to only 19 per cent growth for English content. Out of the 22 official languages in the country, Hindi has made quite an impact on the Internet. There is however still a problem in areas with low network, which need to be worked well upon for this number of consumers to grow more.
Google is now going to work on the statistics received and lay focus on Hindi more strongly than the other vernacular languages. “Some of these include voice search being optimized for English in the Indian accent, and in Hindi to find answers faster, easier and more local. Apart from language, we are also offering offline features like the ability to save Maps or YouTube Offline to help users access services in patchy networks or without incurring huge data charges,” he said.
When we travel to villages in India, we see signs displaying in local languages for the comfort of the localities. Though many in the villages are fairly educated and some can even understand English, they are still much more comfortable with their own languages.
A report back in 2013 stated that 37% Indians prefer using Internet in their local languages – and this percentage would have only grown in last couple of years.
Many stayed away from the Internet because of lingual disabilities, even though they were keen on getting online. The industry has now taken a note of the same and has been developing websites and apps in various languages to cater to the diversity of the country.
It’s good to see that India’s getting digital. :)