Google announced that Gmail will now recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters, so suers can send emails to, and receive them from, people how have such characters in their addresses.

Believe it or not, half way through 2014, this still hasn’t been a thing.

Gmail software engineer Pedro Chaparro Monferrer says, “Whether your email address is firstname.lastname@ or something more expressive like corgicrazy@, an email address says something about who you are. But from the start, email addresses have always required you to use non-accented Latin characters when signing up. 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.”

“But all that could change,” he adds. “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). In order for this standard to become a reality, every email provider and every website that asks you for your email address must adopt it. That’s obviously a tough hill to climb. The technology is there, but someone has to take the first step. Today we’re ready to be that someone.”

Google will also add the functionality to Google Calendar “shortly”.

In terms of Gmail becoming more of a global service, Google launched thirteen additional languages last month.

Image via Google