Don’t get scared as this does not mean that you will need to learn Latin for using Facebook as the site is still available in English along with more than 70 other languages.
What Facebook users get is the seamless ability to translate the site into Latin. Though Latin is supposed to be a nearly dead language, considering that it’s not used by people in day to day life, it is still studied by language students. And it is this group of people who can benefit from Facebook’s latest move as well as contribute to the development of such features.
Facebook also introduced language translation support for a few other languages namely Georgian, Faroese, Azeri and Nepali. Some of these languages are spoken by several million people worldwide while some are used by specific communities living in select geographic regions. Since Facebook relies upon crowd-sourced translations it’s up to the users to make good use of these benefits and see them grow.
It’s great to see such big and recognizable brands like Facebook and Google paying attention to languages other than English. Until recently, the web was dominated by the English language, not that it’s something bad, but then the world has so many other wonderful languages spoken by millions of people who should be given a chance to express themselves on popular global platforms.
An interesting bit of trivia - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg studied Latin and Greek in high school, he has also mentioned in interviews that he was thinking about studying classics at Harvard before he dropped out to run Facebook.





