YouTube is inviting its international community to choose a new moniker. Back in June, the platform expanded its Handles to enable usernames in 74 languages other than English. Two months later, YouTube is sharing some encouraging early results from that development. 19 million channels now have YouTube Handles that use international characters.
Handles are distinct from traditional YouTube channel URLs because they begin with an @ symbol and allow users to append a custom name to their account. YouTube began making the switch from URLs to Handles in 2022 so that it could keep up with naming conventions on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Initially, Handles were available in English only, but YouTube received feedback from international creators who wanted to use local alphabets in their personalized names. That advice led to the June 2024 launch of multilingual handles, which soon became common across the platform. By the start of September, two of the top five channels in our Global Top 50 featured non-Latin characters in their names.
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Non-English Handles are just one of YouTube’s responses to the growing popularity of international languages within formats like Shorts. The platform has also worked with its creators to launch dubbing tools that allow monolingual channels to reach viewers around the world. That increasing globalization has been good news for hubs like KL BRO Biju Rithvik, which has become one of the biggest channels on YouTube despite creating videos in the regional Indian language of Malayalam. (And yes, Malayalam is one of the non-English alphabets supported in Handles.)
Developing these translation tools hasn’t always been simple. YouTube has developed policies that can shift depending on the language. Characters that don’t have linguistic meaning aren’t included in Handles, and Handles have different minimum and maximum lengths in some tongues. Names written with Korean Hangul letters, for example, can only be up to ten characters long rather than 30.
YouTube’s international community has expressed satisfaction with the platform’s attention to its non-English speakers. A post announcing the update has received enthusiastic replies in languages like Khmer, Pubjabi, and Arabic, all of which use non-Latin alphabets that are available in Handles.
As more international creators adopt Handles, will the percentage of non-American channels in our Global Top 50 go up? International channels already rank among the most-watched YouTube channels on the planet, and their piece of that pie might be getting bigger.
