Often times, we’ve had to go to places we rarely know – for that little drop-in visitation, or to close an important business deal. Places we know or perhaps have heard little or nothing about. With the help of maps, we’ve been able to avoid a couple of messy ‘lost puppy’ situations. Thanks to Google Maps, which seem to be the most useful invention of all times and to add an icing to the cake, it’s now available in 39 different languages.
The update was announced today in a blog post by the company. Here is a brief list of the languages —Afrikaans, Danish, Filipino, Hebrew, Icelandic, Mongolian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Turkish, Vietnamese, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Zulu to name a few — are spoken by around 1.25 billion people.
Keep in mind that there are a total of 6,909 living languages recorded in the Ethnologue catalogue. Many of the languages Google chose to add today are spoken by large populations. Swahili, in particular, has 8 percent of the African continent speaking it, while Turkish is spoken by 9 percent of people in Europe.
The new language additions are coming to the mobile and desktop versions of Google Maps on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows OS. Google Maps initially started off in English in 2004, and has gradually rolled out different language availability over time.
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