Apple supports over 200 languages on the iPhone, but doing that takes years of continual effort and consultation with indigenous cultures around the world.
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As far back as 2010, Apple has partnered with members of indigenous cultures to ensure that their languages were correctly supported on the iPhone. Apple even documented some of the process earlier in 2026.
And as a new report in Wired details, there is so much more to it than adding a translation dictionary.
"It's about making sure that the best choice for representing someone's language is being made on our platform," said Apple software engineer Chirasree Mandal, "so they feel good about using it."
Multiple years of work, research, and consultation starts with getting a language's written characters included in the Unicode set. This is the standards body that annually approves new emoji and which all technology firms abide by.
Those firms might draw emoji or a Cherokee letter differently from one another, but they assign it to the code number decided by Unicode. So a message sent between different platforms will display that device's version of the right character.
However, getting indigenous languages right is about more than individual letters, and even when it is, there can be disagreement about what those letters should be. This is where Apple starts liaising with communities to find what they prefer, to find a consensus.
Notice the bottom row of this Cherokee language keyboard. Depending on the letter pressed first, Apple knows to offer different options.
Then there's the layout and many languages use the familiar QWERTY of the US, or perhaps AZERTY of France. But others do not, and then languages such as Nez Perce, or Nimipuutimt, don't use capital letters.
For them, Apple changed the shift key so that it offers accented characters instead of uppercase ones. Or in Cherokee, Apple made the bottom row of keys change as the user types.
That's an example, too, of how the years of research don't end. It's now 16 years since Apple added Cherokee to its iPhone, but that feature of changing the keys is new.
In iOS 27, Apple added more Native American languages such as Blackfoot, Comanche, and Northern East Cree.
Languages such as Cherokee are endangered, and preserving them is ever harder.
"The foes we've had historically are the so-called Age of Discovery, colonization, the displacement of our people economically and geographically, boarding schools," says Chuck Hoskin Jr., principle chief of the Cherokee Nation. "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 [like Apple] that can help us accelerate what we want to do," he continues.