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How many Indians speak English? This has become the burning issue for e-commerce in India, and the answer to this question might not exceed 100 million people, with probably only half that number of people with a low degree of expertise.
Add to that that out of 390 million Indians who use the Internet, only 40% conduct online transactions, according to a study by Google, Bain & Company and Omidyar Networks. You have two things: a real crisis in the monetization of gigantic evaluations commissioned by companies like Flipkart and, of course, the momentum behind Amazon's decision to launch a Hindi website for its Indian users.
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Earlier this year, I wrote an article that shows how critical Indian and local languages have become not only for startups like Sharechat, but also for foreign giants like Google, who want to exploit its future result, especially in view of its ban on exploitation in China.
Amazon has realized that to see real and significant numbers in India and for its e-commerce market to realize expectations of its growth from $ 33 billion to $ 150 billion by 2022, according to an estimate from PwC and KPMG, 1.2 billion who do not speak English.
The following statistics have undoubtedly led to this achievement: English-speaking users will barely reach 199 million by 2021, while Indian-language users will double to 536 million. The same study surveyed 7,000 urban and rural smartphone users in eight different languages and found that 99% of smartphone users speaking a local language had access to the Internet using their smartphone, compared with a national average of 78%. Therefore, launching Indian languages for anyone who operates in India is no longer an experience, it is a success imperative in the country.
Hindi language users of Amazon will be able to display a menu and choose it rather than English on the main website. The option is now available on Android and the mobile website, soon incorporating Apple devices and desktops. Other Indian languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, which are large linguistic populations to the east and south, will also be added shortly, but it makes sense that the l '39 Hindi is chosen from over 425 million people. one language and about 120 million others do it as a second language.
It is ironic that English, which has allowed the Indian elite to become CEO of Pepsi, Google, Mastercard and McKinsey among other global companies, and to allow its engineers and doctors to become rich and rich abroad. capable in the same way, is now supplanted by hindi in e-commerce. Hindi, after all, was supported by the British in the late 1800s as one of the tools used to undermine the then Mughal Empire in power, which used Urdu like official language and fomented division between Hindus and Muslims.
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In fact, Urdu and Hindi overlap by about 80%, and the origins are fascinating, complicated and controversial. It is said that Urdu came out of the military camps of the first Turkish-Persian Mughals. Hindi was based on the dialect Khari Boli and Devanagiri writing, which developed its literary tradition from the 16th century. At one point, the two languages converged sufficiently to establish an important overlap, but became competitors for official language status in the approach of independence. At that time, the British had created a loophole between them, intermittently supporting them based on the Raj's realpolitik games, and the end of the bloody end of partition made Urdu the official language from Pakistan. new constitution chiseled in 1950.
Today, the 23 Indian states still use their own languages. Someone from the state of Karnataka, where some 64 million people largely speak Kannada, can cross the border to reach the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the population of 50 millions of people speak mostly Telugu.
However, Hindi, taught as a second language in most schools in the country because of its official language status, has a popular ambassador in the form of the Hindi film industry, also called Bollywood. from South. Although southern India is deeply opposed to the imposition of Hindi by the federal government in various ways, it is perhaps the only language other than English that has an Indian cache.
And yet, none of the big names in e-commerce has so far been able to meet the needs of Hindi-language users. according to Reutersneither Flipkart nor the number three remote Snapdeal have a local language version of their websites, but they are definitely looking into the launch of Amazon. Even PayTM Mall, managed by the PayTM digital payments provider, has most of its ads in English even though it has now allowed customers to shop in 10 Indian languages.
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The decision of Amazon is as much part of a number-driven necessity as a powerful symbol induced by a changing India. English is no longer such a status symbol, a hangover of deep insecurities and imitative aspirations that the British Raj struck on its subjects as they were trying to imitate their masters. Today, Hindi is in vogue, as are other regional dialects such as Bhojpuri of East Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, particularly in the north. 39, film industry.
That does not mean that English is still not very ambitious when it comes to getting a job or going abroad to a university education. That's always the case. Yet, slowly but gradually, new generations of young urban Indians are claiming their linguistic heritage alongside their English to reinforce their identity. But for the gigantic majority that remains, Hindi has nothing to do with identity politics or national pride. It is simply their only mode of communication, to which e-commerce is waking up quickly.
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