Now, tweet in Kannada and 3 more Indian languages

Twitter just got hyper local, adding support to tweet in Kannada and three more Indian languages - Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil.

Keen to boost its user base in the country, the social networking site has made it easy for twitterati to tweet in more regional languages. This takes the count of supported Indian languages to six. Hindi and Bengali have been available for users since a year, the social media company said in a blog post on Saturday. Over the last two years, Twitter has become hugely popular in India with politicians, filmstars and other newsmakers commanding lakhs of followers. Support for more vernacular languages could widen the social network’s reach even furt­her.

Hashtags in Hindi and a few South Indian languages have triggered a rush of tweets in the past. But the ability to tweet all the 140 permitted characters in Kannada or any of the five other languages is expected to attract even more people to the Twitter fold.  

Translation centre

According to Twitter, the four new languages were partially translated by a community of Twitter users via the translation centre. “We couldn’t have done it without their help. By supporting Twitter in these languages, we are making our platform for live, public conversations more accessible to Indians all over the country,” it said. Twitter India’s head of communications, Rohan Vyavaharkar had this to say: “At Twitter, our constant focus is to enhance user experience so that more and more people can use the platform and reap benefits from it.”

Users could go to the settings menu on their phone and choose the language. “For the Android app, users simply need to change the language settings on their mobile devices to any of the four languages,” explained the blog post.  Twitter India currently has a user base of 22.2 million, according to market research company eMarketer.