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Apple job listing hints at iOS keyboard support for additional languages & scripts

Apple currently supports over 50 languages and varying script systems with its system-wide keyboard in iOS, but a new job listing hints that it is working to add support for additional languages and writing systems. Apple is looking to add engineers to its iOS keyboard and text team, and its UIKit Frameworks team, to “work closely with international teams and native speakers to accommodate all the world’s script systems.”

Apple has done a lot of work on the iOS keyboard in terms of language support in recent years, and most recently announced that “improved Chinese input including handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters” would be arriving in iOS 7.

iOS currently supports the over 50+ languages listed below, but users continue to request other unsupported languages and script systems. For example, Maltese, Afrikaans, and the Persian or Perso-Arabic alphabet are just a few not yet supported. 

English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese – Simplified (Handwriting, Pinyin, Stroke), Chinese – Traditional (Handwriting, Pinyin, Zhuyin, Cangjie, Stroke), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Emoji, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic/Latin), Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

The keyboard hasn’t received much of an upgrade in iOS 7 apart from its look, but there has been talk of Apple including new gesture based typing systems similar to Swype and Android’s Gesture Typing feature.

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Comments

  1. Baback (@baback1347) - 11 years ago

    Hey pal, iOS supports Persian since iOS 6 and we are using it. let me know how can I post pictures from my iOS7 with Persian language writing.

  2. Here’s hoping Khmer finally gets some iOS love.

  3. mrappleseed - 11 years ago

    I’m hoping for an IPA keyboard for a long time already, but I assume this will never happen.

  4. wakablogger - 11 years ago

    Unfortunately, the keyboard continues to offer very limited choices. Holding the “o” down doesn’t bring up ǒ, which would be easy to do and make it easy to type in pinyin. Holding down the “l” brings up ł, but I think that was already there. It appears there is no support for small katakana for Ainu, Inuktitut syllabics, Lushootseed diacritics or lots of other characters needed for lots of languages. You can get a Lushootseed app, for example, that enables you to copy and paste into other apps, but Apple is really dragging their feet on this.

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.