India, the youngest & the most diverse country in the world, speaks 780 languages. Three years of scrupulous research done by the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) draws us towards this conclusion.
A majority of linguists estimate that half of the 7000 languages spoken across the globe shall vanish by the end of this century. A lot of them also believe that due to globalization & commercialization, almost 90% of the present spoken languages would come to the verge of eradication.
Through this article, we not only want to raise our concerns regarding the preservation of diversity through languages but also communicate some interesting facts that might make you look responsibly at the importance of regional languages.
Content in Regional Languages: The Stats
Fortunately for us as Indians, two of our languages, Hindi & Bengali, are among the top ten most spoken languages in the world. Hindi’s position in the world is arguably sovereign as it is the most spoken Indian language in the USA and it also is the most spoken Indian language outside India. The 2011 language census data released in 2018 reveals that almost 44% of Indians speak Hindi as a primary language. This would mean around 440 million Hindi-speaking people in India alone; the number is larger than that of the total population of many countries. The number has gone above 500 million in 2020.
The ‘Nisha Madhulika’ Story
Ex-DB Corp Ltd. employee and a prominent food blogger Nisha Madhulika insightfully highlighted the importance of Hindi content in one of her interviews. She is one of the early adopters of Hindi as the primary language for her content on the digital platforms. Back in 2010, starting a Hindi food blog was an idea that she chose simply to pass the time. Today, the YouTube chef has more than 10 million subscribers on the platform.
As she recollects, she says, “I didn't expect a lot of response because the discovery of local language content on Google was more difficult than it is now. Surprisingly, I got an excellent response. Information about my website spread through word of mouth, and I got a lot of visitors through search, too. Today, a bulk of my visitors come from Google Search, so I can say that the situation has changed a lot. As local languages become stronger on the Internet, I expect it will get better and better.”
A lot of linguists also believe that Hindi can play a potentially significant role in motivating Indian Expatriates to keep their cultural roots and contact with their homeland intact. One of the reasons why many Indians residing overseas have started consuming Hindi content over the last few years is the realization of the fact that those who have failed to pass on their linguistic heredity have experienced their children losing interest in Indian culture.
As per the data from the Language Census 2011 released in 2018, Hindi speakers account for 44% of the Indian population. With the burgeoning of smartphones and the prevalent reach of internet services, this population has now started coming into the mainstream. “Year in Search: Insights for Brands Report”, released by Google in 2019, suggests that “70% of all smartphone-related smartphone searches in India come from small towns.”
“Indian language internet users are expected to account for nearly 75% of India’s internet user base by 2021, and Google search trends show a significant move in this direction,” said the report.
Vikas Agnihotri, country director of Google India, opines that the online space in India has never been more vibrant. “India has become the fastest internet-consuming country in the world, and the internet has now become the bridge to Bharat’s aspirations”.
The most common chimerical theory that exists, in general, is around the buying capacities of the Hindi-speaking market. A lot of brands and, marketers & communication managers, even today, are sceptical about planning constant communication for this audience as the narrative of low spending capacities is still a part of the common thought process. Hence, the potential consumer from smaller towns of the country is usually ignored while planning communication strategies. The Google report gives enough data to suggest contrarily.
As per the report, there is an average yearly addition of 40 million users on the Internet & and the Internet is being welcomed into homes all over India. Interestingly, the rise in online search volumes in non-metros has now outpaced the metros.
Consumers in non-metros are using the Internet to search for information regarding insurance, beauty and travel more than metros.
As Caesar Sengupta, Vice President of Product Management at Google, aptly puts it: “As the next wave of people come online for the first time, they're not going to be coming online in English. And out of those new Internet users, hundreds of millions of them will be Hindi speakers. We know at Google that we need to provide a great experience in Hindi across all of our products, from making the software UI work well in Hindi to letting people easily input Hindi script on smartphone keyboards.”
Hindi queries related to laptops and PCs have doubled, while there has been a 2.3X surge in Hindi queries about smartphones and mobile phones. Also, queries in regional languages are growing faster than English in e-commerce categories like clothing, beauty, and personal care.
A few interesting facts that were derived from the Google report are:
- 90 out of 100 new internet users in India are likely to use the Internet in their regional language.
- 61% of all searches across BFSI are coming from non-metros
- 55% of all auto-related searches come from non-metros
- 45% rise in commuter bike segment searches, with more than 60% of queries coming from Non-metro cities
- A 237% growth in Hindi searches related to food is being observed
- Top 4 Hindi search queries include YouTube, Video, Bhojpuri Gaana and Motu Patlu
A lot of marketers would opine that since the modern-day child under the age group of 15 would not consume content in regional languages, the fact that Motu Patlu - a series of animated stories for kids found a place in the top 4 searched keywords invigorates the significance of Hindi Content in the digital age. Recently, the government of India has proposed to make Hindi a mandatory language for school kids. The consumer of the future would definitely be accustomed to the language.
The Dainik Bhaskar Story
While DB Corp was strategizing the roadmap a few years back, they mapped Indian consumers as 400 million Hindi speakers, whereas the English speakers were mapped as 70 million. The number in itself was convincing enough to derive the conclusion that a majority of this nation speaks Hindi.
Today, Bhaskar.com, which is operated by DB Digital, is the 3rd largest media site in the country. It is also the most prominent Hindi news site in India.
Just like Nisha Madhulika, DB Corp has been one of the early adopters of Hindi as the primary language for their online content, and they have hugely benefitted from it.
“We are at an inflexion point. In another six months, the local language will dominate online”, says Gyan Gupta – CEO of DB Digital, as per “Year in Search: Insights for Brands Report” released by Google in 2019
A torrent of statistics backs the observations of DB Corp.
- More than 44% of India’s 1.3 Billion people use Hindi as their primary language.
- The percentage of Hindi-only Internet users is also soaring, especially in rural India, where approximately 134 million Internet and 87 million mobile-Internet active users are based.
- The number of local-language Internet users is rapidly growing at 47% year over year. All thanks to the increasing use of smartphones.
This growing group of regional language users is ravenous for entertainment, information and engagement in their language, and their penchant for digital content signals an exciting potential. This potential allows brands to reach out to a whole new audience.
“Local languages are a high priority for well-established businesses in the country. They look at local language engagement as a driver to multiply their total addressable markets in the rural base, after covering the urban target audience,” quotes the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). And as this case of DB Corp testifies, the early movers have already started seeing the results of their efforts.
Harshil Karia, MD at Schbang, quotes, “The geographical advertising layered with messaging in localized languages lets the consumer feel a greater connect with the brand.”
The IPL franchise ‘Mumbai Indians’ was quick to comprehend the importance of Hindi, and they chose to use it as a language offered to its 724k subscribers. Keeping the non-metro fan base in mind, the franchise has started offering YouTube videos with Hindi titles. It added to the popularity of the franchise’s YouTube handle as Hindi-speaking fans can now use Hindi as their primary language to search for content posted by the channel.
Similarly, the other two franchises using their regional languages to communicate with the fans are Royal Challengers Bangalore, led by Virat Kohli and Chennai Super Kings, led by captain cool Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The former has recently released its anthem for the 2020 season, which is a mix of English, Hindi & Kannada, while the latter has been using Tamil to keep its loyal fans engaged in its native language. Their fan following is proof of the loyalty that the regional language has brought to the franchise.
As senior writer Asif Upadhye has penned down in one of his articles for Brand Equity, he writes, “To further fuel marketing and branding potential, regional content only makes the digital medium that much more accessible to consumers, creating widespread awareness and converting simple interest in entertainment to the actionable aspects of consumption and patronage of a brand.
According to a recent report published jointly by Google and KPMG in April 2017, 88% of internet users show a more active response to Indian language advertisements than to those in English.
With an increasing number of brands understanding the significance of vernacular communication, a large, untapped, digitally literate audience is being reached out to. These are the consumers who are Internet savvy and have access to digital devices but who have not been able to relate or connect to English as a language. With regional content, it isn’t just brand awareness that can skyrocket but also brand recall. Brand philosophy intertwined with easy-to-understand quality entertainment that is effortlessly accessible online creates the perfect blend of appeal and awareness.
With higher internet inclusion, higher brand reach, and ultimately broader relatability, regional content is poised to take digital India by storm, and it is here to stay.”
An article shared by Warc.com, which was sourced from the Economic Times, Ad Gully & Television Post, also highlights some interesting statistics & thoughts on this subject. The article talks about the User-generated content platform for women, Momspresso.com. A recently released data insight by Momspresso.com revealed that currently, 65% of the content that is being created is created in regional languages and that content accounts for 85% of the page views. These growth numbers were led by Hindi, which contributes to 65% of the page views, followed by Marathi (10%), Bengali (8%), Tamil (7%) and Malayalam (6%).
The platform also found that 60% of its regional content is consumed by an audience between the age group of 22 – 35 years, which is popularly known as the millennial audience.
Vishal Gupta, the CEO of Momspresso.com, says, “Considering that Indian language users are expected to make up 75% of India’s internet user base by 2021, the future potential of vernacular is undeniably huge”
The Google KPMG report also states that Indian language internet users are expected to grow at a CAGR of 18% to reach 536 million by 2021. English users are expected to grow at only 3%, reaching 199 million within the same period.
BYJU’S, the leading platform for online learning, claims to have run multiple regional outreach social media campaigns across key markets like Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, with good responses. Mrinal Mohit, COO of BYJU’S, says, “Providing content in local language drastically increases engagement with parents.”
However, there is still a gap in the demand & supply of regional content. For 550 million native Hindi speakers, there are only 100k Wikipedia pages & only about 0.04% of Hindi websites. The divergence becomes even more noticeable when you add other Indic languages to the equation: for more than 800 million native speakers of various Indian languages (namely Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu), less than 0.2% of the world’s websites are created.
The numbers clearly state that the regional content in the present scenario is falling short of demand.
Keeping aside the technical challenges and consumer preferences, there is another resistance to fondling regional content. And the vast fragmentation of languages within India. With 22 official languages, catering to native speakers of every language becomes too challenging for most businesses. And since India has the world’s 2nd largest English-speaking population, companies are focused on targeting 125 million English speakers, which is colossal by any standards. Though, discounting more than 800 million potential consumers doesn’t seem to be a great idea.
This is primarily the reason why digital advertisements in local languages account for less than 5%. However, due to a projected exponential increase in local-language content, this figure is expected to reach 32% of digital advertising by 2021. In turn, with more local-language content, the number of Internet users in India is projected to increase by 39%, of which 75% will be propelled by development in rural areas.
In his conversation with Financial Express, Sunil Kamath from ShareChat also added his thoughts on the subject. Highlighting the fact that along with user-generated content for 60 million other language users, including Marathi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Kannada and over 100 million content pieces of Hindi User-Generated content were created on their platform, he said, “National and regional brands have also started getting attracted and are already driving campaigns on the platform in the Hindi language as we are best placed to provide them the desired scale and engagement.”
He also added, “Apart from content creation, there is also an extremely high engagement. We saw 1.98 billion WhatsApp shares of Hindi content. Maximum content posts in Hindi are coming from cities like Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Jabalpur, Patna and Lucknow.”
Going by the stats revealed by ShareChat, it is also understandable that Hindi is not merely the language for a target audience in Non-Metros, but it stands tall in the Metros, too.
The Big Pitchr firmly believes that this is the time for your business to start thinking about creating & promoting digital content in regional languages - especially Hindi if you haven’t done that already. A brand can look at creating consumer messages or marketing campaigns and even B2B content for the audience in India or anywhere else in the world where Indic linguists live. A brand can start small by trans-creating its pre-written content in regional languages. It can move towards writing fresh content in the native languages and ensure the establishment of a personal connection with its consumers.
A Hindi content strategy will open your world to these untapped markets. And with more than 550 million Hindi speakers across the globe, regional language communication just might be your most powerful communication strategy yet.
The potential to reach more than 550 million Hindi-language users is exciting for businesses targeting India’s marketplace. For established businesses, local-language engagement means multiplying the total addressable market in the non-metros. This is not only the case for more prominent brands but also for local small and medium businesses and also for enterprising individuals.
With more than 800 million regional language speakers in India and around the world, businesses that invest in regional content today are bound to gain a whole new set of consumers tomorrow.
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