The most significant question about Facebook – after the social network has introduced six Indian languages to its service – is – “will “desi” languages help Facebook expand its user base in India?”
Let’s first talk about new Indianized service features of the social networking site. Facebook has recently launched its service in Hindi and five other regional Indian languages including Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam.    

The Facebook’s latest features allows browsing in Indian languages, but the site is not yet equipped with transliteration that facilitates instant conversion of the English script turning into phonetic-based texts in other languages. The site so far allows the Indian users to browse the site in Indian languages. The site allows users to change language settings through the ‘settings’ tab or through the language option on their Facebook homepage.

According to analysts, the “desi” languages will help Facebook expand its user base in India, only after it gets transliteration, which will allow the Indian users to communicate in Indian languages. The Facebook’s main rival Google’s Orkut offers Indian language transliteration in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

The “desi” languages can attract Indian users, but some analysts still feel that the “desi” languages will not any play significant role in attracting more users, as the majority of tech-savvy youngsters prefer English as communication language.

However, the analysts for the “desi” languages believe that the Indian languages are certainly going to help Facebook, as they have helped Google’s social networking site to earn top position in India.
The market research firm comScore has reported that Orkut is the most popular networking site in India, and Facebook is the second most popular social network in India. According to comScore, Orkut got 12.8 million visitors of the total 19.3 million visitors on social networking sites in India at the end of 2008 – 3 times more that Facebook’s 4 million visitors.