How Does Apple Bring Indigenous Languages to the iPhone Keyboard?

To save endangered languages, technology companies such as Apple are working with Indigenous communities to meet the next generation where they type.

"They're hearing it in our native language — it didn't happen a generation ago," Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tells WIRED. "Fortunately, we have come a long way from teaching and memorizing the classroom to a world where children can see creativity that sparks the imagination and helps every child become more expressive and literate."

The Cherokee Nation has about 1,500 active speakers left, most of whom are over 70 years old. Hoskin Jr. says society is rapidly losing this generation, which is why he has devoted his time to teaching second language learners. It even has a baby immersion program, hopefully their first words will be Cherokee.

He says: "The enemies we have had throughout history, the so-called age of exploration, colonialism, the displacement of our people economically and geographically, are boarding schools. "But that's nothing compared to the math we're facing now. That's why we're filled every day with this urgency to do everything we can to find partners who can help us accelerate what we want to do."

One of those accelerators is Apple. The Cherokee Nation has a long history with the iPhone maker, and Cherokee was the first Native American language to be included in iOS in 2010. Today, Apple says its iOS keyboard supports more than 200 languages ​​and language variants, and last year a handful were added in iOS 26, including Haitian Creole and Nez Perce. In iOS 27, it expanded native language support to include other Native American languages ​​such as Blackfoot, Comanche, and Northeast Cree.

The goal is to meet young people who currently spend most of their waking hours: phone screens. Hoskin Jr. says that to revive and save a language, it has to be accessible. Apple says the effort isn't simply translating words. It's a multi-year effort that requires in-depth research, and the company relies on community members for expertise.

But the process does not start in Cupertino. It actually starts with Unicode. You may have heard of it - it's the organization that approves and standardizes the new emoji that appear on your smartphone every year. It also controls time zone localization, currency names, imperial vs. metric, etc.

Before you can type or read a character on a smartphone screen, it must exist as a recognized character in the Unicode standard. "Everything starts with Unicode in terms of a language, but it really starts with characters and scripts," says Toral Cavison, Unicode CEO. We now have over 157,000 characters.

Cavison calls Unicode a kind of digital Switzerland—a neutral consortium where competitors like Apple, Microsoft, and Google sit at the same table with linguists and volunteer contributors. (Cavison told WIRED earlier this year that Unicode has only four full-time employees.) Proposing a language, getting it approved, and then encoding the character set can take three to five years.

After coding a script, platforms like Apple and Google need to add font support. Without this step, a character can appear as an empty box, often called "tofu". Next is orthography: the set of rules and systems for writing a language. Often, languages ​​have a well-defined orthography, but when it's not standard, communities use ad-hoc alternatives because historically existing keyboards don't support it.

Take the glottal stop - the speech sound heard in the throat between syllables when you say "oh-oh." Some languages ​​have distinct characters for glottal stops, but since some keyboards do not support them, many native cultures use substitutes such as the question mark to represent the sound. This is when Apple reaches out to the community to find the best way to represent sounds in digital text.

This brings us to the keyboard layout. When a community already has a fixed physical keyboard layout — like Osage — Apple adapts it directly to the software keyboard. Some cultures prefer QWERTY layouts that people are already familiar with.

Other languages require more customized approaches. For example, the Nez Perce or Nimipuutímt do not use capital letters. Instead of the Shift key changing traditional uppercase letters, Apple repurposed it to show a secondary layer of highlighting, so users don't have to hold down individual keys to see those characters, which can slow down typing. In the Cherokee language, each character primarily represents a consonant along with a vowel sound, a form known as a syllable. Apple added adaptive vowel keys to the bottom row, so when the user types a consonant, these keys change to show the vowel combinations they can make.

This is a more recent change to the Cherokee keyboard - one Apple approached the community about, meaning building a keyboard for a single language is not a one-off project.

But digitizing the language of an indigenous culture has not always been harmless. Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar and researcher at Bishop's University, studies how indigenous peoples are using digital technologies to recover their language heritage. He recalls how Maori speakers turned down offers to sell their language to tech companies.

"There is a historical memory of the ways of dispossession that indigenous peoples have experienced in the world," says Llanes-Ortiz. Working in their revitalization efforts, Māori have been very adamant about protecting access to and preservation of their language materials as they have been exploited. "They have experienced knowledge extraction in the past."

According to Chirasree Mandal, a software engineer at Apple, language sovereignty and data ownership come first. "We don't own anything and make it very clear that we don't try to store any information we get from this process," he says. "It's about making sure that the best choices are made to represent someone's language on our platform so that they feel good about using it."

For its part, a Google spokesperson tells WIRED that it has a long history of bringing lesser-known and indigenous languages to its platforms so people can communicate with each other, citing collaboration to integrate languages such as Manx and Maori. Google also says it's exploring how generative AI can simplify the coding and research needed for new languages, but "successful integrations will require direct native input" for the keyboard to meet community needs.

Hoskin Jr. says that writing syllabically was considered a badge of honor for young Cherokee speakers. People typing their name in Cherokee on Facebook - it's empowering. But he sees the development as vulnerable to a broader political rhetoric in the United States that pushes for a unified, English-speaking America, which he says bypasses several chapters, including Native American history.

"The biggest enemy we have right now to save the Cherokee language is the passage of time and the fragility of human life," says Hoskin Jr. "Time is precious to everyone, but it is especially precious to us on this mission."