In a move that the company says is aimed at making emails global, Google has announced that Gmail, and shortly Calendar, will begin recognizing email addresses containing accented or non-Latin characters.
In 2012, an organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created a new email standard that supports addresses with non-Latin and accented Latin characters (e.g. 武＠メール.グーグル). Google has decided to adopt this meaning Gmail users will now be able to send emails to, and receive emails from, people who have these characters in their email addresses.
In a blog post posted on its official gmail blog, Google said ” Less than half of the world’s population has a mother tongue that uses the Latin alphabet. And even fewer people use only the letters A-Z. So if your name (or that of your favorite pet) contains accented characters (like “José Ramón”) or is written in another script like Chinese or Devanagari, your email address options are limited’ it said “But all that could change.”
It said Starting now, Gmail (and shortly, Calendar) will recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters.
Last month, we announced the addition of 13 new languages in Gmail. These 13 new languages that joined the Gmail famil are Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Chinese (Hong Kong), French (Canada), Galician, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala, and Zulu.
The company says Language should never be a barrier when it comes to connecting with others and with this step forward, truly global email is now even closer to becoming a reality.
