By Allison Leigh

Facebook has been receiving quite a bit of press in the past week when they passed Myspace in overall unique visitors.  One caveat to the growth has been that Facebook is expanding globally much more than domestically.  It is this component of growth that could be why Facebook announced this morning that they had added 55 new languages to its platform.  Chad Little had this to say,

“Our goal is to support Facebook in the native language of all our users and people who want to use the site. In this regard, we’ve received requests from thousands of people who want to help translate Facebook into languages beyond the sixteen released languages and the eight that are in the process of being translated.  Based on this feedback, we opened 55 new languages this week for translation by the community. Now native speakers can use our Translations application to translate Facebook into additional Asian languages (Malaysian, Vietnamese), African dialects (Zulu, Xhosa), regional varieties (British English, Canadian French) and even rarely spoken languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.”

This announcement follows up on their new verification process for homeschoolers last week (covered).  It is clear that Facebook’s focus is on enabling everyone, no matter where they are in the world and what their background is, to connect with other friends and like mided individuals.