Guys, you can now send emails in five Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam through Google’s Gmail. Well, Gmail’s new feature, “Indic Language transliteration” – recently introduced in Gmail and Google Apps by Google India – allows you to write your mails in the aforesaid five Indian languages.

The new Indic Language transliteration feature of Gmail lets the Gmail users write their emails in five Indian languages using an English language keyboard. According to Google, the vernacular language Gmail service is initially available in five Indian languages, but the service will subsequently be expanded to more Indian languages.

Now you may ask how the Gmail’s new transliteration tool helps composing and sending emails in the selected five Indian languages. Well, the new transliteration tool has been integrated with “Compose” box; it helps converting English text into phonetic-based script in vernacular languages.

The new transliteration feature has been enabled by default for Gmail users in India, but if it hasn’t been enabled by default yet, the procedure to enable the new transliteration is simple and easy. The Gmail users will have to go to "Settings" page to enable the new feature through the "Language" section. The users can select their language from the drop-down list next to the icon.

Commenting on the new Indic Language transliteration feature of Gmail, Rahul Roy Chowdhury, product manager at Google India said “A small set of population is online at present and we want more people to be online. Once the market develops, monetisation will follow.” He added, “The new feature is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle.”

So, the Gmail service is now available worldwide in a number languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, UK English, US English, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

The Indic transliteration tool is presently also offered by Quillpad from Tachyon Technologies, in which Rediff has 26% stake. Rediff’s Indic language capabilities have been powered by Tachyon.