Google’s email client, Gmail, is clearly an incredibly popular service, something that its multiple language support no doubt contributes to. That level of support just increased thanks to the added availability for one of the world’s most popular and one of the world’s most unique.
According to the Gmail blog, support for both Welsh and Latin American Spanish is now supported in their email service. While Spanish has been supported by Gmail for a number of years now, according to the blog post, the Latin American Spanish inclusion, ” is designed to be a closer match to the expectations of Spanish speakers in the Americas.” With over 300 million speakers, adding such support only makes sense for Google, especially considering how much Gmail and Google+ are tied together, coupled with their desire to increase Google+ exposure.
As for the Welsh language support, as you can see in the lead image, Welsh is a little different than its English counterpart, enjoying the use of many consonants. The Welsh alphabet, while it using the Latin alphabet, has some very noticeable differences including double letters and the lack of a letter “Z”:
a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y
As the post points out, the Welsh language has an increasing user base, and including support for a language that’s near 1 million speakers makes good sense when you’re trying to attract international users:
Welsh, as a living language, is used by an increasing number of speakers, in their everyday life. For this project, we’d like to thank the Welsh Language Commissioner for working with us to make Gmail available to Welsh speakers around the world. The project was completed through Google Translator Toolkit, which is a Computer-Aided Translation tool supporting over 100,000 language combinations.
Pretty soon, we’ll be able to use Gmail as a Universal Translator tool.
