Voice-first social media platform Clubhouse has gone back to school to learn itself a baker’s dozen worth of new languages. The company has announced in a press conference in India the addition of 13 new languages to its app, making it more accessible to people who want to see the platform available in their native languages. The app update bakes in localizations for the millions of people who don’t speak English, or who simply prefer a local-language alternative.
The 13 languages are French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil and Telugu. It’s an interesting line-up, which notably misses four of the top 10 most-spoken languages in the world (Chinese, Arabic, Bengali and Russian).
The languages will be shipped in the Android version of the app first, which makes sense. According to Statcounter, more than 96% of Indian mobile users are on Android, with iOS lagging behind with a market share of around 3%. Its Android-first approach with this update is encouraging for an app that took an embarrassingly long time to make an Android version available at all.
“It has honestly amazed us that people in so many countries have managed to come together to do this on an app that only supports English,” a PR representative for Clubhouse mentioned in an email to TechCrunch earlier today. Well… quite.
In addition to the company’s newly discovered love for multiple languages, Clubhouse also announced a brand-new app icon, featuring musician, singer and songwriter Anirudh Deshmukh (pictured above). Based in Mumbai, Anirudh joined Clubhouse at the start of the year and by the spring, had launched his now 72K-member club, Anirudh, where he hosts his nightly show Late Night Jam.
