Quora is now available in Hindi, more Indian languages are coming

One of India’s most popular forums, Quora, was just launched in Hindi. It’s going to go a step further with its localisation and launch in other regional languages as well. Hindi was the first language to launch because it was found to be widely spoken among the platform’s users as per Gautam Shewakramani, the India Country Manager at Quora.

That being said, this isn’t first time that Quora has expanded its language portfolio. The Q&A forum is available in Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese and Indonesian as well. Which obviously works well for the brand since it has 200 million monthly unique visitors.

Shewakramani also expressed that Quora wants to keep things as authentic as possible, which is why they aren’t going to monetise the platform just yet. He said that since India has always been such a good fit for Quora’s mission to ‘share and grow the world’s knowledge’ that the company would prefer to focus on the credibility and quality of information.

Language localisation

Language localisation is an important market penetration strategy for online platforms considering that therein lies the potential of 205 million Internet non-users who aren’t online only because most services aren’t in their language of choice. And, that’s after being home to the second highest Internet user base in the world. That is, 481 million users as of December 2017.

Do we need it?

The Indian language-enabled Internet ecosystem spans from content generators to content consumers. Key categories within that framework include chat applications, social media platforms and digital write-ups. Cumulatively they account for the service that Quora offers to its users.

Now, since that’s the case, it’s a red flag if 60% of Indian Internet users claim that the limited language support and content places a barrier between them and the adoption of online services. On top of that, 68% said that they consider digital content in local languages to be more reliable that what’s available in English.

And even though Quora has started off by launching in Hindi, Tamil has the highest Internet adoption levels among Indian language users. Hindi and Kannada come in second and third. But, as per KPMG estimates, that will change soon. According to their estimate, by 2021 the number of Hindi Internet users will overtake the number of English users.

Quora isn't the only company curating their growth strategy keeping India's vast consumer base in mind. Even Google's sharpened it focus towards India with the 'Next Billion' initiative that's brought in a plethora of apps designed specifically to cater to the Indian online ecosystem. The most recent example of that is their new hyper-local social app called 'Neighbourly'.