Blogging in south Indian languages

Well, I was expecting this, but not so soon. Blogger announced it on 12th here.

The first indication of this was when Orkut had the option to type in south Indian languages -- Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. Blogger had introduced Hindi transliteration some time back. What's remarkable is out of the five Indian languages provided, four are south Indian ones, including Malayalam, my mother tongue. ഇനി മലയാളം ഫോണ്ട് ഡൌണ്‍‌ലോഡ് ചെയ്യണ്ട -- I mean, now I don't have to download Malayalam fonts.

I can see that Google family engineers working on Blogger have done their research well to find out that while Hindi binds north India well, there is no one common language that binds the south in a similar manner. One can survive with Hindi anywhere from Mumbai in the west to Kolkata in the east, or even further north east in the the Seven Sisters. But each of the four south Indian languages are so distinct unless one knows each of them it is difficult to survive in the respective state.

During the eight years I was in the north, I had no difficulty travelling from place to place or even communicating with the local people. But when I came down south, I felt out of place, even though I am from Kerala.

So, it's not without reason that Blogger has provided four south Indian languages and Hindi. However, I am sure it will provide other major Indian languages like Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali etc. also.

Hats off to the engineers for the facility that has been provided to get the spelling of the transliterated word correct. Type out the word in English; if the trasliterated word looks inaccurate, then just click the word; a menu drops down, from which the right form can be selected.

Wow, this looks wonderful. The only glitch: the spell-check has stopped working. Hopefully it's getting fixed.