Tamil hashtag trending no. 1 on Twitter; #hashtags now in 12 Indian languages

New Delhi: Days after Twitter extended support for hastags in 12 Indian languages, #தமிழ்வாழ்க, became a trending topic on the micro-blogging site.

The #தமிழ்வாழ்க means 'long live Tamil' and ever since the hashtag took centrestage on the Facebook-acquired site, users have started posting interesting facts about the Tamil language and historical tidbits about Tamil Nadu, where the language is widely used.

One of the users posted a meme showing the US President Barack Obama's family dressed as Tamilians.

Non-Tamilian Twitter users have also expressed surprise on the hashtag going viral, with one user @harguneet saying that local languages are going to be massive on the Internet in India this year.

Twitter had announced Hindi support in September 2011. However, the #hashtag didn't lend itself to native Indian scripts. 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.

Tweets can now be hashtagged in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Oriya, Nepali and Sanskrit.

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

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.