Building in the language I grew up speaking

Most of my 17 years in tech happened in English. The code, the documents, the meetings, the bug reports: all English. Now, as a Gujarati tech founder, I spend my days on a product whose whole point is to speak Gujarati and Hindi well.

That shift has made me think more about language than I ever did as an engineer. This post is about why I chose to build in the language I grew up speaking, and what that choice actually asks of you.

Three languages, three jobs

I speak Gujarati, Hindi and English. Rather than sorting them into "mother tongue" and "other languages", I find it more useful to see that each one does a different job.

English was the language of my work. Every employer I have had, from IndiaNIC Infotech in 2009 to Vagaro until 2026, ran on English. Technical words, product words, management words: I learnt all of them in English first.

Hindi is the language that crosses borders inside India. It is how you talk to someone from another state, how a lot of film, television and advertising reaches people.

Gujarati is the language of home, of the street, of the shop counter. It is the language people use when they are not performing for anyone.

That last part matters more than it sounds. When you want someone to trust you, you speak to them in the language they use when they are not performing.

Why build in Gujarati at all

Gujarati is spoken by more than five crore people, in Gujarat and across the large Gujarati diaspora. That is more than the population of many countries. Yet for a long time, the software and tools around us treated it as an afterthought: a translation layer added at the end, if at all.

For small businesses, this has a direct cost. A local shop in Gujarat sells to customers who speak Gujarati. If the shop wants a video ad, the easy options were usually in English or Hindi, or made by an agency they could not afford. So the ad either did not get made, or it got made in a language that felt slightly borrowed.

That is the gap I started Bolo Media to close. Bolo turns a product photo or a few lines of text into a ready-to-post video ad or reel, with natural voices in Gujarati and Hindi. The name itself is the point: "Bolo" (બોલો) means "speak" in both Gujarati and Hindi.

I have written more about why I think this is not just a translation problem in the vernacular internet is not a translation problem.

What makes Gujarati hard for technology

Building in Gujarati sounds simple until you try. A few things make it harder than English, and they are worth naming.

The script

Gujarati script is closely related to Devanagari, the script used for Hindi, but it drops the horizontal line that runs along the top of Devanagari words (the shirorekha). Letters combine into conjuncts, and vowel signs attach above, below and beside consonants. Fonts, text rendering and even simple things like line breaks can go wrong in ways that an English-only team would never notice. Bolo has a practical guide on writing in Gujarati script if you want the details.

How people actually write it

On phones, a lot of people write Gujarati in Roman letters. "Kem cho" for કેમ છો (how are you). "Majama" for મજામાં (doing well). Others mix Gujarati, Hindi and English inside one sentence, sometimes inside one word. A product that only accepts "proper" Gujarati script is not meeting people where they are.

How it sounds

Voice is the hardest part. A voice can pronounce every word correctly and still sound wrong, because rhythm, stress and tone carry meaning. Gujarati spoken in Surat does not sound the same as Gujarati spoken in Kathiawad. Numbers, prices, brand names and English loanwords all need to sound natural in a Gujarati sentence. When it goes wrong, listeners notice in the first second, and that first second is all an ad gets.

What growing up in a language gives a builder

Here is the honest advantage of building in your own language: you can hear when it is wrong.

No test suite can tell you that a sentence is grammatically fine but sounds like a government circular. No metric can tell you that a voice is technically clear but feels like a stranger. A native speaker hears that instantly. It is a quality check that sits in your ear, not in a spreadsheet.

It also changes what you care about. Engineers love to measure things they can count. But for a product like Bolo, the thing that matters most, whether a shop owner's customer feels spoken to rather than spoken at, is something you mostly judge by listening.

There is a risk here too, and I want to be fair about it. Being a native speaker can make you overconfident. Gujarati is not one thing. It varies by region, by community, by age. My ear is one ear. A good product has to listen to many more than mine.

Language and respect

There is a word in Gujarati, potanu, that roughly means "one's own". When something is potanu, you treat it differently. You trust it more, you forgive it more, you share it more easily.

I think good local advertising feels potanu. It sounds like it came from your own town, not from a head office somewhere else. That feeling is hard to fake, and it is very easy to break with one wrong word or one stiff voice.

Building for that feeling is a form of respect. It says: your language is not a setting in a dropdown menu. It is the main thing.

Why this matters beyond Bolo

India has 22 scheduled languages and hundreds more spoken every day. For most of the history of software, the people who spoke those languages were asked to adapt to the tool. AI gives us a real chance to flip that, so the tool adapts to them.

Gujarati founders, and founders who build in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi or any other Indian language, have an advantage the largest companies in the world do not: we live inside these languages. We know when something sounds right.

I spent most of my career working in English, and I am grateful for what it taught me. But the work I care most about now is in the language I grew up speaking. If you build in your own language too, I would like to hear what you have learnt.