Change your Gmail language settings

You can change the language that you use to see Gmail, and use special keyboards to type in other languages.  

Change the language that you use to see Gmail

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the top right, click Settings .
3. Click Settings.
4. In the 'Language' section, pick a language from the drop-down menu.
5. At the bottom of the page, click Save changes.

Type in another language

You can type in languages such as Hindi, Arabic or Chinese using input tools, including special keyboards. There are different types of input tools for different languages.

1. Open Gmail. You can only use input tools from a browser and not the Gmail app.
2. In the top right, click Settings .
3. Click Settings.
4. In the 'Language' section, click Show all language options.
5. Tick the box next to 'Enable input tools'.
6. Choose the languages that you want to use input tools with and the type of keyboard that you want to use.
7. Click OK.
8. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
9. Open your inbox.
10. In the top right next to Settings , click the language icon. If you have multiple input tools, use the down arrow to switch between them.

Change the direction of the text

1. Open Gmail. You can only use input tools from a browser and not the Gmail app.
2. In the top right, click Settings .
3. Click Settings.
4. In the 'Language' section, click Right-to-left editing support on.
5. At the bottom of the page, click Save changes.

When you start a new email, you'll need to change the direction again. In the bottom left of the compose window, click Formatting options  Right-to-left.

Fix garbled text in emails

If you can see letters from the wrong language in your emails, you’ll need to change one of the settings.

1. Open a browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
2. At the top of your browser, select View Encoding (Internet Explorer) or Text Encoding (Safari, Firefox).
3. From the list, choose the language that you want to use.