Late last week, Odnoklassniki, Russia’s second-largest social network, announced the prospective launch of its Tajik version. The language of this small Central Asian country is expected to become the last to join the family of the former Soviet Union languages Odnoklassniki speaks.
In its brief message to users, the network said its mobile version was already available in Tajik; and Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted Maria Lapuk, a spokesperson for Odnoklassniki, as saying at a press conference in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe that “the web-based version will also be fully localized in a near future.”
According to Lapuk, the network aims to create a culturally-focused adaptation rather than a mere translation of Odnoklassniki’s content. The service will “cover local news and music content, and we intend to launch Tajik-language support services as well,” she emphasized.
The spokesperson pointed out that Odnoklassniki’s 262,000 daily Tajik audience, mostly men, has tripled over the past year, a growth rate “unparalleled in the post-Soviet area.”
The new launch caps the network’s effort to carve out a tangible share of the Internet and mobile markets in the former USSR and now the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In April 2012, Mail.Ru Group, the LSE-listed Russian Internet group that owns Odnoklassniki, kicked off a series of ex-USSR localizations, and now the network can speak Russian, Uzbek, Moldovan, Georgian, Armenian, Azeri and Ukrainian. An English version, announced a year ago, has still not appeared.
