Apple adds Blackfoot, Comanche and Northern East Cree to the iOS 27 keyboard

A speaker who wants to write the glottal stop in a text message, on a phone with no key for it, types a question mark ^[17]. That is what users actually do, and they do it because the keyboards historically available did not support the character ^[16]. On a roadmap the same item reads "add language".

The work begins outside Cupertino, at Unicode ^[9]. A character has to exist in the Unicode Standard before it can be typed or read on a phone ^[10]. Unicode CEO Toral Cowieson said, "Everything does start with Unicode in terms of a language, but it actually starts with characters and scripts." ^[11] The standard holds more than 157,000 characters ^[12]. Proposing a language, verifying it and encoding the set can take three to five years ^[13]. Cowieson told Wired earlier this year that Unicode has only four full-time employees ^[14].

Encoding is not the end of it. Platforms then have to add font support, or the character can show up as an empty box, often called "tofu" ^[15].

The next steps are decisions that belong to the speakers. Where a language has no settled orthography, communities use ad hoc replacements ^[16], and Apple connects with them to work out how the sounds should be written in digital text ^[18]. Layout follows, and it has no default. Osage already had a physical keyboard layout, so Apple adapted it directly ^[19]. Some cultures prefer the QWERTY layout they already know ^[20]. Nez Perce has no capital letters, so Apple repurposed the Shift key to reveal an accented secondary layer ^[21].

Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, listed colonization, displacement and boarding schools as the language's historical foes ^[23]. He said: "But it's nothing compared to the mathematics we're up against now. Which is why we're filled with this urgency every day to do all we can to find partners that can help us accelerate what we want to do." ^[7]

The goal, as Wired describes it, is to reach young people on the phone screens where they spend much of their waking hours ^[22]. The article does not report usage or retention figures for any of the added keyboards ^[24]. The case that a keyboard helps a language survive rests on the Nation's stated aim.

For a team choosing which language to take on next, we'd sort each one by two facts taken from the steps above: whether the script is encoded and covered by fonts, and whether the community has settled its spelling and layout.

- Encoded and settled: adapt the layout the community already uses, as Apple did for Osage ^[19]. - Encoded, spelling unsettled: hold working sessions with speakers on how sounds are written, since users are already typing question marks ^[17][18]. - Settled, not encoded: the wait belongs to Unicode, at three to five years ^[13]. - Neither: both waits apply.

We'd book speaker time ahead of engineering time for every language outside the first cell. The tradeoff is a roadmap whose dates depend on people outside the company, and on a standards body with four full-time staff ^[14].