As competition grows intense, companies are seeing language as a powerful tool to win more market shares, and they are prioritizing highly populated countries with indigenous languages.
Clubhouse has announced the addition of 3 Nigerian languages, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba to the audio platform. According to information received from the company, the language localization support is aimed at making the platform more accessible to Nigerians who don’t speak English or who simply prefer local-language alternatives.
It is coming at the same time LinkedIn is introducing Hindi, targeting about 500 million Indians. Hindi is a language spoken or understood by more than half a billion people in India and over 600 million people globally, and will be the first Indian regional language to be supported by the social network.
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Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba are the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria, and make up the country’s most spoken languages. But besides the three languages, Clubhouse has rolled out other 10: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional (Taiwan), Farsi / Persian, Hausa, Igbo, Marathi, Nepali, Somali, Thai, Turkish and Yoruba.
For Clubhouse, the Language localization means that the app experience, such as prompts, notifications, descriptions, topics, and more, will be in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba when the languages are selected. For example, When someone joins the app, the onboarding language will now be in their local language. If someone wants to start a room, they will see “+Room” prompt and selections all in their local language. This means that people who join clubs like Yoruba Palava, IGBO, Naija House, etc, will not only have discussions about culture and history in their local languages but experience Clubhouse in them too.
LinkedIn service already supports 25 languages, but said in addition, its website and mobile apps will give users the option to access their feed, profile, and messages in Hindi. Users will also be able to create content in Hindi through LinkedIn’s desktop and mobile apps, it said.
Though India is a major market for several global services, LinkedIn has found it hard to win a significant number of users. India accounts for just over 6% of over 1.3 billion visits LinkedIn garners in a month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb. Out of its 800 million global users, LinkedIn says it has only over 82 million users in India, more than 20 million of whom joined the service in the last three years.
The support of Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and 10 other languages follows a global trend as the language localisation feature is one of the most requested features on the app outside of the United States. Clubhouse initially rolled out support French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Tamil and Telugu. Overall, the app has support for 26 languages on Android with more on the way.
In the coming months, LinkedIn said it will work towards widening the range of job opportunities available for Hindi speaking professionals across industries. It is also looking to add more Hindi publishers and creators in the coming weeks to boost engagement in Hindi on the platform.
