When Apple released iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 in September, much of the buzz centered on the update’s revamped Siri AI. However, the update also brought a handful of new indigenous languages to the device’s keyboard, allowing users to type and send messages in Blackfoot and other languages. In the US, Monday is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a federally recognized holiday honoring Native American heritage, culture and sovereignty.
Some of the supported languages have only a couple of thousand speakers. Consider Cherokee, which has only about 1,500 fluent speakers in the entire world. Cherokee was the first Native American language Apple added to iOS back in 2010, and its inclusion has been seen by some as a welcome development.
“The technology that we utilize with Apple has allowed us to take everything that we really are trying to achieve here, which is the perpetuation and the revitalization of Cherokee language and culture, and use that same technology to make it relevant to the young people that are learning here,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said, according to Apple.
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Teachers in Oklahoma are also using these tools in their classrooms to help more students engage with Native American languages. These tools can help students practice their pronunciation by allowing them to record themselves to revisit later.
“In Cherokee language, every sound is so important,” Erlinda “Daksi” Soap, a fifth-grade teacher at Oklahoma’s Cherokee Immersion School, told Apple. “One sound off, and you’re saying a completely different word.”
There are 85 characters, originally 86, in the written Cherokee language used to represent the sounds — or syllables — in the spoken language. Cherokee artist Roy Boney Jr. worked with Apple engineers to bring the Cherokee syllabary to Apple devices.
“A big part of being Cherokee is you ensuring things like language and culture survive and continue,” he told Apple.
High-schooler Olivia Daugherty graduated from the immersion school in 2024. She said she remembers her father teaching her to count and name animals in Cherokee as a child, and that she was nervous about losing her language and culture. Now, younger generations are helping to secure the language’s future.
“I was worried about my language and culture, and the way I might lose my community, and I might lose my language,” Daugherty told Apple. “My niece, she’s a first-language speaker in our language … She’s one of the first in a very long time.”