Twitter Rolls Out Hashtag Support for Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian

Akky over on Asiajin just pointed out that Twitter has rolled out support for Japanese hashtags. So where before Japanese users would use a phonetic hashtag to represent a Japanese word (e.g. ‘jishin’ for ‘earthquake’), they can now write the actual Japanese characters after the hash.

Asianjin noted an interesting observation that many of us English-speaking users may not have considered:

As Japanese is not a language separated by spaces, it is a bit tricky to direct which part is hashtag or not. You need to insert extra spaces before and after the hashtag, or use Japanese punctuations.

Twitter’s Integration tech lead Dana Neumeyer tweeted a few hours ago that in addition to Japanese, Twitter now also supports Chinese, Korean, and Russian hashtags (see below).

Of course in China Twitter is still blocked, but for the resourceful users who are savvy enough to leap the Great Firewall, this new feature will surely be appreciated.