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That is what I think many good intentioned people do when they install computer systems without locally relevant content - they deploy the equivalent of a computer lab filled with the Star Trek cannon in Klingon.

Think about it. If your users are not literate in English, if they cannot read and write in the Internet's main language, what they see on screen makes as much sense as Klingon does to you or I.

And before you think users will find or create content in their own language, let us look at the article per language count on Wikipedia. If we add in the number of people who know each language, you can quickly see that many African languages are grossly under-represented online.

Now the Wikipedia isn't the entire Internet, but it is a good proxy for user-generated content online. And if your users speak Kiswahili, Luganda, Chichewa, or Xhosa, giving them a computer lab with English-only content is as useful as Klingon.

When people talk of the many languages of Africa, and need for localized content, they're often thinking about English, French, Kiswalhili, or Xhosa.

But in the technology space we have our own languages in addition to these. We have languages of hardware and networking, from servers, to routers, to nodes and bridges, to the languages of code, like PHP, Java, and C++.

Thanks to Jonathan Gosier, we now know the popularity of each programming language in Africa with this handy chart:

Now why would it matter to a business that Java is way more popular than J2ME? There is business opportunity in this variability. If you are a big company, you should try to dominate the Java and PHP market, but if your small, walk away from the popular languages. You'll not beat the big players at their own game.

Yet a new entrant who is willing to gamble on Python or Ruby can make a name for themselves before the big players know what happened. Also, with unique skills, you can price your services at a premium to others, making your company much more profitable. See Apple as a great example.

Just be sure that if you choose one language to focus on, you keep some skills in several. This will allow you to translate between them as needed, matching the right software language to the job.

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