Gmail enabling typing in Hindi and other Indian languages is a really welcome feature. Thanks, Google. It was announced today on Gmailblog as well as Googleblog. This will help so many new people to write emails in Indian languages. But, isn’t Google getting ahead of itself when it claims,
Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice.
Thousands of other email users, including me, have been writing emails in Indian languages for years. I must have written my first Hindi Gmail soon after I started Gmail in 2004 (screenshot below). And the method has been pretty easy – as easy as enabling the Hindi keyboard in my Windows, which is the right way to compute multilingually. There have been a number of other ways of writing in Indian languages directly into your email box too, even if you don’t count the copy-paste online editors, like the one on this site.
So, thanks Google once again. But please don’t claim this couldn’t be done before. It’s just that you have made it a little bit easier for newbies. People used to IMEs (Input Method Editors) will continue doing it the “proper” way. Google made exactly the same claim when they added Hindi typing to Blogger two years ago, when Hindi blogs had already been in existence for a few years. Come on, don’t lie, Google!
