Google News expands to include Punjabi, Gujarati as additional languages

Chandigarh, August 7

Google India has announced two significant developments to augment their ongoing efforts to support the Indian language news ecosystem and expand the Indian language web more broadly.

Google News will now be expanding to include two additional Indian languages: Gujarati and Punjabi. These new languages will be available in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of languages to ten in India. The languages earlier available on Google News included Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

The GNI Indian Languages Program, announced earlier this year, has received over 600 applications from news publishers across India. Of these, 300+ publishers have been selected to participate in the program, which will provide them with support to modernize their digital ecosystem and improve the user experience across web, mobile and app.

The program delivery will be in nine languages, including English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi, making it Google’s most diverse technology program for news publishers.

Sanjay Gupta, Country Manager and Vice President, Google India, said, “The addition of supported languages on Google News is one way in which we want to keep driving the expansion of the Indian language internet, so that more and more users are able to harness the power of information. News publishers are core to this effort and we remain committed to partnering with the news ecosystem.”