When I read the entry 'Non English Posts make up over Two Thirds of Total Blog Posting' at ProBlogger of Darren Rowse, the first thing that came to my mind is that why there were not many blogs in South Asian languages. Bangla (Bengali) and Hindi are among the top 10 languages in the world in terms of number of speakers. These days, Indian companies, Indian professionals and Indian students are creating havoc in the outsourcing world. Still, in the blogging world, South Asian languages are hardly visible. I am providing here some common reasons about this poor condition:
1. Use of Internet is still very limited among the common people in South Asian countries.
2. Operating systems and browsers do not have support Hindi and Bangla 100% yet and this problem will be solved after the release of Windows Vista (especially for Bangla).
3. PC users in South Asia do most of the works in English language and many of them do not have good speed or skill in typing their own language in their PC.
4. Most serious bloggers from South Asian countries are good in English language and for getting a wider audience they blog in English.
5. Google Adsense does not support any of the South Asian languages and that is why those who want to earn money by blogging blog in English.
Do you think that I have covered all the major reasons?
I think you have missed one point. Blogging is a new phenomenon to Bengalis. Its true you won't see a lot of Bangla blogs and initially there were little efforts like these: 'List of Bangla blogs'.
But when Somewherein, a software company based in Dhaka launched 'Bandh Bhanger Awaz', the Bangla blogging platform, in Dec 2005, a revolution occured. Within 5 months it had 1.5 million hits and over a thousand registered users with hundreds of posts generating each day. With active participation in the comment section, this has been the advent of Web 2.0 in Bangla. Sadly only a few reveiews of this effort has been published in the media. This platform ofcourse need to come to age like the counterparts like blogger or moveable type but this is a terrific starter. Apart from mostly young bloggers, there are professional like poets, journalists, academics and engineers using somewhereinblog.net.
My point is you only need to generate interest (specially to youths), the rest of the development will be made autometically.
Posted by: Rezwan | May 2, 2006 3:36 AM | Permalink to Comment