THE next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. The globalisation of the web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in Kannada. But using Kannada on the web involves computer keyboard maps that even he finds challenging to learn.

So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Ram Prakash said Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India. “You’ve got to give them an opportunity to express themselves correctly, rather than make a fool out of themselves and forcing them to use English,” he said.

But there is a shortage of non-English content and applications. So, American technology giants are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to build and develop foreign-language websites and services. “Gone are the days in which you can launch a website in English and assume that readers from around the globe are going to look to you simply because of the content you’re providing,” said Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch.

In the last two years, Yahoo and Google have introduced more than a dozen services to encourage India’s web users to search, blog, chat and learn in their mother tongues. Microsoft has built its Windows Live bundle of online consumer services in seven Indian languages. Facebook has enlisted hundreds of volunteers to translate its social networking site into Hindi and other regional languages, and Wikipedia now has more entries in Indian local languages than in Korean.

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