Bangalore: The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the US.
The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs such as Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore.
Web lingo: Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer who prefers Kannada. The globalization of the Web had inspired him to develop Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Namas Bhojani / NYT
Hanumanthappa learnt English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself in his native Kannada with friends and family members. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even he finds challenging to learn.
So, in 2006, he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into the local language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from cellphone maker Nokia Corp. and also drew the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool.
Hanumanthappa said Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about one-tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech. “You’ve got to give them an opportunity to express themselves correctly, rather than make a fool out of themselves and forcing them to use English,” he said.
Only there is a shortage of non-English content and applications. So, American technology giants are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to build and develop foreign language websites and services—before local companies such as Quillpad beat them to the punch and the profits. “Gone are the days in which you could launch a website in English and assume that readers from around the globe are going to look to you simply because of the content you’re providing,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch Llc., an online research company based in New York.
Nowhere are the obstacles, or the potential rewards, more apparent than in India, whose online population, Jupiter says, is poised to become the third largest in the world after China and the US by 2012. Indians may speak one language to their boss, another to their spouse and a third to a parent. In casual speech, words can be drawn from many tongues.
In the last two years, Yahoo Inc. and Google have introduced more than a dozen services to encourage India’s Web users to search, blog, chat and learn in their mother tongues.