English daily newspaper, The Hindu has launched its website in Tamil located at tamil.thehindu.com. This is probably the first time The Hindu has launched a site in an Indic language (Correct us if we are wrong).

It’s not surprising that the newspaper has launched a site targeted at South Indians. Previously the company claimed to have an Average Issue Readership (AIR) figure of 18.21 lakh with a prominent presence in south India. It has also announced the launch of Tamil newspaper, to hit stands on September 16, 2013.

Targeted at Tamil speaking audiences, the site offers news in categories such as India, World, Business, Sports, cinema, opinion, general and society. Besides news titles, it includes streams of news flash – an excerpt of news items. This is an interesting addition for those who want to consume news quickly. The site sports the same design as of its parent site with columns for each category.

News sites in local Indian languages

A lot of apps and websites have started offering support for Indic languages in last few months. While our understanding is that Indic language support does not really make a difference in an user generated environment, a lot of content is being consumed in local languages.

In July 2012, Yahoo India has tied-up with Kannada language daily, Udayavani to launch a co-branded Kannada property at kannada.yahoo.com. Yahoo had also tied up with the Malayalam daily Malayala Manorama to launch a co-branded Malayalam portal at malayalam.yahoo.com. Besides this, it already offers a co-branded property in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Bengali, thanks to its tie-ups with Jagran, Lokmat, Dinamalar and Anandabazar Patrikarespectively. It had also previously partnered with Webdunia to offer homepages in Punjabi and Telugulanguages, with aggregated content from Webdunia, however at the time of writing this article, both the homepages are redirecting to Yahoo India homepage.

In October 2012, Netcore-owned Greynium Information Technologies which operates the online multi-lingual news portal OneIndia.in had launched a Gujarati edition at Gujarati.oneindia.in. In the same month, BBC World Service had launched multi-lingual local news apps including apps in Hindi and Urdu among other languages for Nokia’s Series 40 devices, including the Nokia Asha range.

DB Corp, publisher of the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, Divya Bhaskar, Saurashtra Samachar and Dainik Divya Marathi, had launched an online version of its Marathi Newspaper Divya Marathi at divyamarathi.bhaskar.com.

While the exact details on the readership of these sites in Indic languages is not know, Yahoo had previously claimed that that its Tamil site had witnessed a growth of 160% in page views in December 2011 and its Marathi site had recorded a growth of 135% in pageviews during Sep-Dec 2011.