MacOS 11 Big Sur Language Support Articles

Links to Apple's language support articles for Big Sur.

MacOS 11: New Language Features

Apple's documentation indicates that Big Sur should have at least the following new language features:

+New bilingual dictionaries include French–German, Indonesian–English, Japanese–Simplified Chinese, and Polish‑English.

+New fonts for India include 20 new document fonts. In addition, 18 existing fonts have been upgraded with more weights and italics

+Enhanced predictive input for Chinese and Japanese results in more accurate and contextual predictions

I have found 4 additional items on the spellcheck language list compared to Catalina: Irish, Romanian, Punjabi, and Telugu.

Big Sur also lets you switch keyboards via the Fn key, which has a globe printed on it on the latest hardware.

MacOS: Extra Spellcheck Dictionaries

Users who need MacOS spellcheck dictionaries for languages not yet covered by Apple should check this site.

MacOS: Portuguese PC Keyboard Layout

The Apple and Windows layouts for Portuguese differ considerably, and Apple has not yet provided a "Portuguese PC" input source for those wishing to use a Windows keyboard with their Mac.  This page may provide a custom layout that meets these needs.

iOS 14: New Language Features Promised

See the sections on Translate, Siri, Safari, International, and Keyboard in this Apple note for info on new language features expected in iOS 14 to be released later this year.

Here is more info on the new Translate app.

MacOS: Switching Input Source Automatically for External Keyboard

Some laptop users want to have different language input sources for their internal keyboard and an external one the use for certain purposes.  Normally switching input sources requires using the mouse or a keyboard shortcut every time.  

Such users may be interested in this app, which makes the input source switch automatically according to the keyboard being used.

Another possibility can be found here.

MacOS: New Spellcheckers

I don't know exactly when they were added, but I have just noticed that my current version of MacOS  Catalina has the following new (and very welcome) spellcheckers which I am pretty sure were not there when it was first released:

Arabic
Najdi Arabic
Czech
Greek
Hindi
Hungarian
Vietnamese

MacOS: New Mongolian Cyrillic Keyboard

MacOS 10.15 Catalina includes a new Mongolian Cyrillic keyboard, but it does not do the Command level correctly, so that common shortcuts for copy/paste, etc. do not work.  A custom keyboard which fixes this problem can be found here.

MacOS: Customizing the Accent Popup Menus

For a good and up-to-date instruction on how to customize the press and hold popup menus in MacOS, see this page.

MacOS: Fix for Apple Brazilian ABNT2 Keyboard Layout

It appears that the Brazilian ABNT2 input source provided by Apple can have the characters to the left of the 1 key and to the left of the Z key switched from what users expect.  A custom layout that fixes this problem can be gotten here.