Twitter has announced support for four more Indian languages namely, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada on its website and Android app. Hindi and Bengali were already present on the micro-blogging site, bringing the total number to 6.
Users who want to make the switch to one of the new dialects can go to their Twitter page and select their choice from the settings option found in the drop down menu on their profile. Android tweeters will have to change the default language in their phones in order to access it on the app.
The new local dialects have come about with the aid of the company’s Translation Center, where a community of Twitter users partially helped in the translation process. The social media site hopes these changes will make the platform more accessible to Indians across the country.
Having support for six languages enables Twitter to be more competitive against rivals like Facebook, which already has 10. LiveMint reports that the company is looking to bring in a more ‘hyperlocal’ flavor in the interactions on the site and thinks letting users tweet in their native tongue would reflect the regional environment more.
India is set to become the second highest consumer base for Twitter in the Asia-Pacific region. It has over 22.2 million users in 2015, an increase of 30% from 2014. That’s according to a January report by research and analyst firm Emarketer, who further said the number may increase to 40 million by 2018.
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Tailoring Twitter for indigenous consumers is a necessary step for the site’s expansion in the nation. Low-cost smartphones with multiple language support have become increasingly available to the masses and it makes sense to introduce regional dialects to lend more appeal to the website.