It is widely known that Indian languages are massively underrepresented online. Still, just how big a gap exists between the number of speakers and number of pages is shocking. To take just two examples, Hindi and Bengali are spoken by half a billion individuals, are among the top-5 spoken languages in the world, but even taken together, Hindi and Bengali pages do not make it to the top 10 languages on the Internet.
China offers some hope that this gap is merely the result of a time lag. Following the huge growth in Internet connections in the country, online content in Chinese, as measured by websites, is now roughly in line with the population of speakers. Over the next decade, the same phenomenon should repeat with Indian languages. After all, it's only over the last five years that fast Internet has been widely and cheaply available. However, this transformation is not a given; Spanish offers a stark counter example - despite widespread connectivity, online Spanish content still lags the size of the Spanish-speaking population. One likely cause is that many Spanish speakers are bilingual, which reduces the viability of and need for websites in Spanish.
There is reason to be optimistic for the future of the web in Indian and other languages. For one, people want to write, share, and read the language they speak. We have evidence of that from Facebook, which, because it is free and features user-generated content, is far more international than the open web, generating millions of posts in more than 110 languages. Creators in Indian languages, some with histories going back a few millennia, deserve better tools and readers and viewers deserve better ways to discover these works.
We at ScrollStack would like to argue that the precondition for a linguistic renaissance is now in place with the emergence of simple payments and the unprecedented growth of online users who prefer languages other than English. Unlike the ad-supported web with its extreme demands of scale (and still no light at the end of the tunnel) the new web offers viability at a much smaller scale for creative output, thus allowing for the creation and sharing of works in many languages. However, it was not a desire to make this pitch, but Sharmila Sen's (Editorial Director at Harvard University Press) evocative tweet that made me write this post. It was a reminder that passion runs deep for Indian languages and literature.
In the spirit of Sharmila's post, I thought of sharing this Marathi poem that I most often recall in 2020, the year of sleeplessness ( non-Marathi speakers - it is a children's poem by Vinda Karandikar and my favorite line simply says Even in my dreams I slept once more)
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