Not only Hindi, Twitter rolls out #hashtags in 11 other Indian languages

New Delhi: While Indians have been tweeting in languages other than English for quite some time now (Twitter announced Hindi support back in September 2011) one of the most talked-about Twitter features - the #hashtag - didn't lend itself to native Indian scripts. Until now.

On February 15, when India beat arch-rivals Pakistan for the sixth time at a Cricket World Cup encounter, that the hashtag #जयहिन्द began to trend and it came to the notice of users that hashtags had extended to Indian languages. Twitter had actually quietly rolled out support for hashtags in a number of Indian languages a few days before the India-Pakistan cricket match, but it was noticed by only a few.

The overwhelming response to India's win on Twitter made #जयहिन्द the first hashtag in the Devnagiri script to trend on Twitter.

While Twitter is yet to officially announce hashtag inclusion for more scripts, tweets can be hashtagged in the following Indian scripts/languages:

- Devanagari (Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit)

- Bengali

- Gujarati

- Punjabi

- Oriya

- Tamil

- Telugu

- Malayalam

- Kannada

Other languages/scripts that can now be hashtagged by Twitter users are:

- Greek

- Armenian

- Georgian

- Amharic

- Sinhala

- Tibetan

- Burmese

- Laotian

- Khmer

Even before Twitter rolled out hashtag support for these languages, users could add a # symbol before a set of characters, but then these were not indexed, ranked and hyperlinked by Twitter as they now are.