Google today announced that Google Maps is getting support for 39 new languages.

The newly supported languages are Afrikaans, 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.

It’s a bit of a surprise that Google Maps didn’t already support some of these languages already, but better late than never.

In total, about 1.25 billion people speak these languages, so this should open up quite a few new markets for Google Maps, which already has over a billion active users. Chances are, of course, that the app already has plenty of users in countries where they newly supported languages are spoken, but this will surely open up a large new market for Google Maps.

Today’s news follows a range of recent Google Maps announcements in the last two months that range from support for wheelchair accessible routes in transit navigation to a Mario-themed driving mode and real-time commute info coming to iOS.

Source: New feed