MacOS Tahoe and iOS 26: New Language Features

Apple has announced the new features to be provided in the updated Mac and other OS versions to be released later this year. This includes on-device live translation for phone calls, messages, and FaceTime captions.

Language coverage for Messages will be Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. For phone calls and FaceTime, it will be limited to English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

MacOS Sequoia and iOS 18: New Language Features

Apple has published info about the new features in the 2024 updates of MacOS and iOS. As far as I can tell, the only new language features appear to be Hindi translation in both and Kazakh, Lithuanian, and Slovenian system languages in iOS only.

New Dhivehi Keyboard

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the MacOS Dhivehi keyboard has the wrong ounctuation characters for that script (LTR in instead of RTL). This custom layout fixes that. Apple's iOS keyboard does not have this problem.

Typing Haitian Creole

For users who need to be able to type Haitian Creole on Mac devices, the normal US English keyboard should be sufficient. This language only uses one diacritic, the grave accent, which is available by doing press and hold on the base letter and choosing the accent you want from the popup menu that appears.

Apple does not yet offer spellcheck for Kreyòl. If you need that on an iphone or ipad, you can get it by installing the MS Swiftkey keyboard app. On a Mac, you can get the necessary files here. Some info on installing is here.

For translation, Google Translate is probably the best place to go.

MacOS: New Arabic Keyboard Layout

Thanks to Farid Alkorashy, there is a new Arabic keyboard for MacOS for those who need or prefer the Windows Arabic layout. Unlike Apple's "Arabic PC" input source, it puts Arabic numbers (instead of the Hindu form) on the top level, so there is no need to use Caps Lock to access them. You can download it here.

iOS 17: New Language Features

Apple's preview of iOS 17 indicates the following new language features:

QuickPath support added for Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Polish, and Romanian keyboards.

Predictive text added for Hebrew, Polish, and Romanian keyboards.

Multilingual typing support added for Polish, Romanian, and Turkish keyboards.

New keyboard layouts: Akan, Chuvash, Hausa, Hmong (Pahawh), Ingush, Kabyle, Liangshan Yi, Mandaic, Mi’kmaw, N’Ko, Osage, Rejang, Tamazight (Standard Moroccan), Wancho, Wolastoqey, and Yoruba.

New transliteration keyboards: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu

Japanese handwriting keyboard.

Expanded bilingual Siri for Indian languages: Siri for English (India) understands more requests that mix English with any of nine different Indian languages.

New dictionaries: Bulgarian, Catalan, English-Greek, English-Malay, English-Swedish, Greek, Malay, Polish, Punjabi, and Romanian.

New term of address languages: German and European Portuguese.

Vertical Live Text recognition. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Vertical text support for Chinese and Japanese in apps like Contact Posters, Photos Memories, and Calendar widgets.

Arabic kashida support in apps like Contact Posters, Photos Memories, and Calendar widgets.

New Translation languages: Ukrainian.

As far as I can tell, there are no new system or spellcheck languages.

MacOS 14 Sonoma: New Language Features

Apple's Preview of MacOS 14 Sonoma released 9/12/23 indicates the following new language features:

Predictive text added for Hebrew, Polish, and Romanian keyboards.

New keyboard layouts: Chuvash, Hmong (Pahawh), Ingush, Kabyle, Mandaic, Mi’kmaw, N’Ko, Osage, Rejang, Tamazight (Standard Moroccan), Wancho, and Wolastoqey

New transliteration keyboards: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu

New dictionaries: Bulgarian, Catalan, English-Greek, English-Malay, English-Swedish, Greek, Malay, Polish, Punjabi, and Romanian.

New term of address languages: German and European Portuguese.

Vertical Live Text recognition: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Expanded bilingual Siri for Indian languages: Siri for English (India) understands more requests that mix English with any of nine different Indian languages.

New Translation language: Ukrainian

As far as I can tell, there are no new system or spellcheck languages.

MacOS Ventura Update 13.3 Has New Keyboards

Apple's recent MacOS update 13.3 includes the following new language features:

+Transliteration support for Gujarati, Punjabi, and Urdu keyboards

+New keyboard layouts for Choctaw, Chickasaw, Akan, Hausa, and Yoruba

Although not mentioned in the release notes, this update also fixes a bug dating from MacOS 12 in the Unicode Hex input source which made certain characters unavailable.

Typing Sanskrit

While MacOS comes with a Sanskrit Devanagari keyboard, this lacks a number of characters that users of this language may require, including special symbols and Vedic accents and cantillation marks. If you need those, check out the Keyman app and its Vedic Sanskrit Devanagari Phonetic Keyboard.

This keyboard is also available for iOS and browser use.

If you need to type transliterated Sanskrit in Latin Script, Apple's ABC Extended Input Source is probably the best choice.

MacOS: New Cuneiform Input Method

Thanks to Marco Sartori, a new input method is availble for typing Cuneiform script, which is used to write various languages of the ancient Middle East. It can be downloaded from this page.

Put the .inputplugin file in Library/Input Methods or Home/Library/Input Methods, logout/login, and then activate it via the plus button in System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources. Look for it in the Simplified Chinese area. A Readme file should be included which explains how to use it. If you find problems or want to suggest improvements, you can contact Marco at sartma@gmail.com

Here is some earlier info on Cuneiform from this blog.

MacOS 13 Ventura: New Language Features available Oct. 24

Apple plans to release MacOS Ventura on Monday, Oct. 24, and has published a new list of features. As far as I can tell, the new language features are the same as reported here earlier.

Apple Hardware Keyboards for Non-Latin Scripts

See this page for info on Apple's keyboards for Arabic, Bulgarian*, Greek*, Hebrew*, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese (Zhuyin), Thai*, and Ukrainian. The keyboards marked with an asterisk are not available in the US online store and may be difficult to find outside the country where they are used.,

iOS 16: New Language Features

Apple has published a preview of the new features in iOS 16 to be released in the fall. For the language area these additions include:

System Languages: Bulgarian and Kazakh

Keyboard languages: Apache, Dzongkha, Samoan, Yiddish

Dictionaries: Bangla–English, Czech–English, Finnish–English, Hungarian–English, Kannada–English, Malayalam–English, and Turkish–English

Translation: Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch

Live Text: Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian

VoiceOver and Text to Speech: More than 20 additional languages and locales, including Bengali (India), Bulgarian, Catalan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Chinese: Cantonese input using Jyupting and other phonetic methods, Quickpath for Traditional Chinese Pinyin, Changyong layout for Shuangpin users, Sichuanese dialect support.

MacOS 13 Ventura: New Language Features

Apple has published a preview of the new features in MacOS 13 Ventura to be released in the fall. For the language area these additions include:

System Languages: Bulgarian and Kazakh

Keyboard languages: Apache, Dzongkha, Samoan, Yiddish

Dictionaries: Bangla–English, Czech–English, Finnish–English, Hungarian–English, Kannada–English, Malayalam–English, and Turkish–English

Translation: Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch

Live Text: Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian

VoiceOver and Text to Speech: More than 20 additional languages and locales, including Bengali (India), Bulgarian, Catalan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Chinese: Cantonese input using Jyupting and other phonetic methods, Sichuanese dialect support, Changyong input for Shuangpin users.

MacOS 12.4: New Icons for Keyboard Layouts

The latest update of MacOS 12 Monterey replaces the remaining multicolor country flag icons for different language keyboard layout with black/white symbols containing idenfying characters for the language. Users who want to keep the traditional flags can make a customized layout with any icon they want with Ukelele.

Apple Ukrainian Keyboards

Apple has recently started selling stand-alone Ukrainian keyboards, which I don't remember ever being offered before. For more info see this page.

MacOS: New Hungarian Qwerty Keyboard

The Hungarian Qwerty input source that comes with MacOS does not have any semicolon. Here is a version which has that character and others in the same position as the normal Hungarian (Qwertz) input source.

MacOS: Russian Keyboard Layouts Without Russian Flag

Apple has long provided English keyboard layouts with an ABC icon for English speakers who prefer not to have the US or other country flag in the top right corner of their screen all the time. Here you can find a set of Russian language keyboards that have a generic Cyrillic "Я" icon instead of a national flag.

(Install the .bundle file in /Library/Keyboard Layouts or Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts and then activate via System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources > + )

For a Russian layout with a Ukrainian flag icon, see this page.

MacOS: Russian PC Keyboard Layout Error

A poster the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that the Russian PC keyboard layout supplied with MacOS and iOS has an error: The key which is supposed to produce Ё (U+0401, Cyrillic Capital Letter IO) actually produces Ë (U+00CB, Latin Capital Letter E with Diaresis). A custom layout that corrects this for MacOS can be found here. It's not possible yet to make custom hardware layouts for iOS, so the problem cannot be fixed there.

MacOS: Hardware Language Keyboard Availability

Apple produces a large number of different keyboards for specific languages, but which ones you can get depends on where you live. Each country has its own selection of them for sale, and Apple stores do not ship outside their own country, so getting a particular keyboard can be frustrating.

Even the US online store only has about half the total variety of keyboards. Those not available in the US are English International, Belgian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French Canadian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish/Finnish, Thai, and Turkish.