How Apple Puts Indigenous Languages on the iPhone Keyboard
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Chuck Hoskin Jr. fondly recalls watching a room full of Cherokee immersion students crowd around a screen to watch How to Train Your Dragon.
Key facts
- The Cherokee Nation has around 1,500 active speakers left, and most are over 70
- Today, Apple says its iOS keyboard supports more than 200 languages and language variants, with a handful added last year in iOS 26, like Haitian Creole and Nez Perce
- They're hearing it in our mother tongue—that didn't happen a generation ago,” Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tells WIRED
- Chuck Hoskin Jr. fondly recalls watching a room full of Cherokee immersion students crowd around a screen to watch How to Train Your Dragon
Summary
“They're hearing it in our mother tongue—that didn't happen a generation ago,” Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tells WIRED. The Cherokee Nation has around 1,500 active speakers left, and most are over 70. “The foes we’ve had historically are the so-called Age of Discovery, colonization, the displacement of our people economically and geographically, boarding schools,” he says. One of those accelerants is Apple.