Android users can text away in local tongue with ease

BENGALURU: Apps which allow users to type in indic languages could lead to creation of more local language content and increase local language adoption.
Indic languages might finally see better days in the digital world as consumers begin to download local language keyboards for their mobile devices in large numbers.

An indic keyboard supporting 11 languages launched by developer collective Swathanthra Malayalam Computing crossed 100,000 downloads on March 9. Google's Hindi keyboard has already crossed 10 million downloads. Other language keyboards in languages like Kannada are also seeing similar traction.

"We are seeing beginnings of content creation phase. As more people start writing more keyboards will get more intelligent and better," said Vishal Anand, chief product officer at news app Newshunt.

Previous attempts to improve local language penetration on desktop driven Internet have failed to become mainstream. But this new uptake in local language input methods, or ways of typing into a computing device, could lead to creation of more local language content and kick start a `virtuous cycle' of local language adoption.

"Indic language is going through the same evolution that western languages went through," said Anand.

With mobile phones that have embraced the Unicode standard, and the new Android operating system's ability to render Indic languages, it has become increasingly easy to make Indic language acces sible on the mobile phones. Unicode is a global standard to represent text in writing systems. It comprises of an array of code charts, rules and references to represent text in over 100 scripts.

"Mobile penetration is helping the increase in usage of apps. Folks want to interact on social media in their own language for which such apps will be needed," said BG Mahesh, the founder of news portal OneIndia which focuses on local language content.

The new Indic keyboard was built by Jishnu Mohan, a member of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing.