Apple Is Putting Endangered Languages on the iPhone Keyboard

October 13 (IT Home) — Wired published a post yesterday (12 October) reporting that in the official keyboard of iOS 27, Apple has further expanded its support for Indigenous languages, adding Blackfoot, Comanche and Northern East Cree.

The post notes that devices such as the iPhone 18 Pro now support input in more than 200 languages, and that Apple, through long-term collaboration with Indigenous communities, provides keyboards, characters and input experiences for endangered languages such as Cherokee.

Apple has deepened its cooperation with the Cherokee Nation. Cherokee entered iOS in 2010, becoming the first Native American language to be supported. The Cherokee Nation currently has about 1,500 active speakers, most of them over 70, and the community is training second-language learners through immersion courses.

IT Home’s check of public information shows that the Cherokee Nation is one of the largest federally recognised Native American tribes in the United States and is the sovereign government of the Cherokee people, headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The nation has a high profile in culture, language revitalisation and cooperation on digital technology, and Cherokee was also the first Native American language to reach the iOS keyboard.

Apple says adapting a keyboard for an Indigenous language is not simply translation: the work requires years of research and the involvement of community members, and involves character encoding, font support, orthography and keyboard layout, with the goal of extending the language’s use to the phone screens that young people use every day.

The adaptation process begins with the Unicode standard. A character must first be included in that standard before it can be typed or displayed on a phone screen. Unicode now contains more than 157,000 characters, and proposing, validating and encoding a language’s character set usually takes three to five years.

Once the characters are encoded, platforms such as Apple’s and Google’s must provide font support, or the characters appear as empty boxes — known as “tofu”. After that, the two sides must also settle the orthography. Some languages lack standardised writing rules, and users used to substitute symbols such as question marks for special sounds like glottal stops.

Apple also customises keyboard layouts in depth for different languages. Nez Perce, for example, does not use capital letters, so Apple turned the Shift key into a layer of auxiliary characters with accent marks. Cherokee uses a syllabary, so Apple added adaptive vowel keys at the bottom of the keyboard, which automatically appear as possible combinations after a consonant is typed.