Arabic Twitter Coming Soon

posted on: Jan 30, 2012

Twitter announced last Wednesday they are working on adding right-to-left languages, starting with Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu. The efforts of the @supportarabic campaign have not gone to waste.

“More than 425,000 volunteers contributed to the Translation Center, and to date have helped make Twitter available in 22 languages. With their help, these will be the next four,” Twitter stated on their blog. “As soon as our volunteers have completed their translation work, we’ll make Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu available for everyone on Twitter.com later this spring.”

According to a study by Paris-based agency Semiocast, Arabic is the fastest growing language on Twitter. Out of 180 million tweets posted daily, 2.2 million were posted in Arabic, amounting to an astonishing 2,000% increase in 12 months.

Arabic holds the 8th place on the top languages shared on Twitter, just after Korean and Dutch. However, Arabic is still not on the list of 17 languages in which Twitter’s website is translated. As the Daily Dot reported three weeks ago, about 650,000 Arab speaking users are generating 1.23 million tweets a day.

These users have been urging Twitter, through a campaign promoting the account @supportarabic, to take action and make their website available in Arabic.

The account holds over six thousand followers and the Support Arabic campaign has over five thousand members, pressuring the social media company to meet that exact demand. Support Arabic have supported their demands on their website, by saying: “It is one of the oldest languages, the official language of more than 22 countries and spoken by 350 million people around the world. Many languages have borrowed vocabulary from Arabic and that makes it a source language.”

Supporting the Arabic language on the Twitter website will increase the demand for Twitter accounts among all classes of Arabic societies, says Support Arabic on its website. “It will make it easier and more comfortable to adapt to our everyday spoken language.”

Halah Gandeel
Arab News