Apple Adds 3 Indigenous Languages to iOS 27 Keyboards as Communities Race to Preserve Them
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Oct 12
Apple Adds 3 Indigenous Languages to iOS 27 Keyboards as Communities Race to Preserve Them
3 articles · Updated · WIRED · Oct 12
Summary
iOS 27 adds keyboard support for Blackfoot, Comanche and Northern East Cree, extending Apple’s Indigenous-language push beyond Cherokee, which first entered iOS in 2010.
Apple says each language rollout can take three to five years because characters must first be encoded in Unicode, then matched with fonts, orthography rules and a workable keyboard layout.
The company also customizes keyboards with communities: Cherokee now uses adaptive vowel keys, while Nez Perce repurposes the Shift key to surface accented characters instead of capitals.
For Cherokee Nation, which has about 1,500 active speakers left and most over 70, phone-based typing is part of an urgent effort to make the language usable for younger speakers.
That digitization push still carries sovereignty concerns, so Apple says communities retain ownership of linguistic materials even as tech firms and Unicode expand support for endangered languages.