A research jointly conducted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB has revealed the pathetic state of local language websites in India. The total number of local language websites in India, according to this study, stood at 1249. This number was arrived at by using a language specific web crawler and a manual search. The break up of the local language sites is given in Table 1.

The poor number of local language sites reflects the poor ranking of Indian languages as languages most used on the internet. While Hindi and Bangla has third and eighth highest number of speakers globally, they do not figure anywhere among the top ten internet languages. On the other hand, Italian, Korean and French which do not figure among the top 10 languages spoken in the world are among the top ten internet languages as shown in Tables 2 and 3 below.

Table 2: List of top 10 languages spoken in the world

Table 3:Top 10 languages in the Internet

The primary reason for this severe lack of local language websites, according to the study is that local language on the internet is still seen as “labour of love” rather than “need of the hour”. It is for this reason that most of the local language sites are personal websites, blogs or entertainment/news websites.

On a more positive note, the research found that the demand for local language content and applications was mainly from non-metros, which are also the towns where the rate of internet growth has been higher. As Table 4 shows, all local language applications have a higher usage in cities beyond the top 8 metros.

Table 4:Applications used in Local Language

The study concludes that the internet companies should proactively reach out to local language users with new content and new applications in order to bring new users to the internet and follow the examples of vernacular newspapers and local language. As the Table 5 below on the readership pf vernacular language show, English newspapers do not figure in the top 10 list of newspapers by readership. Table 6 shows that mass entertainment Hindi and regional language channels account for almost 80 per cent of total TV viewership in India.

Table 5:Readership of Local Language newspapers

Table 6:Genrewise Television viewership share in India

To download the full report please visit www.iamai.in

About IAMAI

The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) is a not-for-profit industry body registered under the Societies Act, 1896. Its mandate is to expand and enhance the online and mobile value added services sectors. It is dedicated to presenting a unified voice of the businesses it represents to the government, investors, consumers and other stakeholders. The association addresses the issues, concerns and challenges of the Internet and Mobile economy and takes a leading role in its development.