Apple has expanded the roster of Indigenous languages its iPhone keyboard can handle, adding Blackfoot, Comanche, and Northern East Cree in iOS 27. The company says its iOS keyboard now supports more than 200 languages and language variants, a figure that includes Haitian Creole and Nez Perce, which arrived in iOS 26. Cherokee, added in 2010, was the first Native American language to reach iOS.
The work matters to communities trying to keep their languages alive. The Cherokee Nation counts roughly 1,500 active speakers, most of them over 70, according to principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., who said the tribe is losing that generation quickly. It has responded by training second-language learners and running a baby immersion program. Hoskin Jr. described the historical pressures on the language, from colonization and displacement to boarding schools, but said the more pressing problem now is time itself, calling it the greatest enemy to saving Cherokee.
Getting a language onto a phone screen begins well before any work inside Apple. Everything starts with characters and scripts, according to Unicode CEO Toral Cowieson, whose organization standardizes the character sets that devices rely on and now covers more than 157,000 characters. Cowieson described Unicode as a neutral consortium where Apple, Microsoft, and Google sit alongside linguists and volunteers. Proposing, verifying, and encoding a character set can take three to five years.
Apple says the process then requires font support, orthography rules, and keyboard design, and it leans on community members for expertise. When a community has an established physical keyboard layout, as with Osage, Apple adapts it to software; others prefer QWERTY. Nez Perce, or Nimipuutímt, uses no capital letters, so Apple repurposed the Shift key to expose an accented secondary layer. Cherokee's syllabary led Apple to add adaptive vowel keys that change based on the consonant typed.
Not every community welcomes the attention. Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar at Bishop's University, pointed to Māori speakers who turned down proposals to sell their language to tech companies, citing a historical memory of dispossession and knowledge extraction. Apple software engineer Chirasree Mandal said the company does not own anything from the process and is clear it is not trying to silo data. A Google spokesperson said his company has long brought lesser-known and Indigenous languages to its platforms through collaborations such as Manx and Māori, and is exploring generative AI to simplify coding and research, though native speakers must participate directly.
Hoskin Jr. said typing in syllabary has become a point of pride for young Cherokee speakers, and that people write their names in Cherokee on Facebook. He nonetheless sees the gains as vulnerable to political rhetoric in the US that promotes a monolithic, English-speaking America and omits Native American history.
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