Using My Phone in Tamil

I set my phone’s language to Tamil a few months ago. There was no big reason behind it. I was typing something on WhatsApp in Tamil and just noticed how the rest of the UI was in English. Felt a sudden rush and changed the language.

Tamil is written and spoken differently. It confuses even native speakers if they’re not into reading lots of Tamil. I didn’t have that much trouble except for the technical glossary in app UIs.

A lot of Tamil speakers, maybe Indians too in general, just use their phones in English except for grandmothers. So there aren’t enough words available in the general culture for recent tech terms. I feel that’ll be solved if more people start using electronics in their own language. But most of Indian population adopted computers and mobiles when English was the only option they understood, they have no reason to change now.

After a couple of weeks I thought of changing it back to English. But I saw one of my colleagues using his laptop in German and got inspired by it, so I put off the change. I don’t think I’ll change the phone language back to English now. The Tamil letters look amazing on some screens.

Some apps like Kindle don’t care about phone language settings and still show English menus. I learned why it’s important to design apps with i18n in mind.

One thing I’ve noticed less after the change is the number of websites/apps assuming I’m a Hindi speaker just because I’m from India. I don’t know if this change is affecting that or not, but if it does, I’m grateful.

Now I’m thinking of trying it on my laptop too. I know it’ll be a difficult change, but why not?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​