Apple's iOS 27 adds keyboard support for Native American languages including Blackfoot, Comanche and Northern East Cree, on top of more than 200 languages and variants, the iPhone maker says.
The harder question is who controls the language data behind such tools: a platform, a community or, as in Wales, a government.
Level Two of Seven: What Apple's iOS 27 Keyboards Do Not Settle
Unicode, which standardises text across devices, defines seven levels of technical language support; typing is the second, Input. The seventh, Advanced, covers services such as speech recognition and translation, which typically rely on 'massive amounts of data', where ownership questions tend to arise.
Apple's keyboards sit near the bottom of that ladder, while the Welsh and Māori projects below sit at the top.
Apple says it leans on community members for expertise, and one of its engineers told WIRED the company is 'not trying to silo any data'. Its 28 May 2026 statement on the Cherokee work describes a collaboration, not terms. Consultation can sound like authority. It isn't.
How Apple Built Keyboards for Cherokee and Nez Perce
Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee artist, worked with Apple engineers to bring the 86-character Cherokee syllabary to iPhone, iPad and Mac, the statement says. It puts fluent speakers at fewer than 1,500 among more than 480,000 Cherokee people.
Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation, said in the statement that iPad 'puts it all within reach of a young Cherokee'.
Apple helps equip the Cherokee Immersion School and Sequoyah High School with iPad and Mac through its Community Education Initiative. WIRED reported that for Nez Perce, which has no capital letters, Apple repurposed Shift to reveal an accent layer, and added Cherokee vowel keys that adapt after each consonant.
A keyboard lets a language be typed, but it does not make a phone understand it.
Bangor's Iriaith Project Gathered Nearly 500,000 Welsh Sentences
At level seven, data is the raw material. The Welsh Government says Bangor University's Iriaith project, funded through its technology grants, collected nearly half a million new English-Welsh sentences and released them as open data to train AI and translation models. The project also developed Welsh-language AI models that can respond in Welsh.
The Government also funded free Welsh synthetic voices, Geraint and Gwyneth, which learners and teachers can download through its Hwb learning platform for non-commercial use. It says Microsoft Teams can now transcribe Welsh and English at once, and that it continues to work with Microsoft on bilingual working.
Four organisations share the 2026 to 2027 grants and report back by the end of March 2027. The open data and the voices each come with terms on who may use them.
Te Hiku Media Kept Its Māori Language Data Under Its Own Licence
Te Hiku Media, a non-profit Māori-language broadcaster in New Zealand, turned down a US localisation firm's hourly offer for Māori audio and declined to add its data to Mozilla's open Common Voice project, WIRED reported in 2021.
The report said it built speech-to-text from about 320 hours of data. It also said the broadcaster's licence requires projects to benefit Māori people and gives them ownership of what is built on the data.
That leaves three approaches: consultation at Apple, a community licence at Te Hiku and public funding in Wales, which also works with Microsoft. A peer-reviewed Springer paper on Indigenous languages in AI argues that community agency and Indigenous data sovereignty are vital to ethical practice, its abstract says.
It also examines how government-led projects and Big Tech collaborations handle consent and ownership.
Researcher Running Wolf has likened AI to 'a pencil', useful but not enough to save a language, in remarks quoted on Bluesky by Bridget Chase. In an r/newzealand thread about Google and Māori data that drew 160 upvotes, one commenter asked whether the Google agreement 'applies to derivatives'.
Apple's statement does not address that question for its keyboards.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What languages does Apple's iOS 27 support?Apple's iOS 27 adds keyboard support for Native American languages including Blackfoot, Comanche, and Northern East Cree, among others.
- What is the significance of Unicode in language support?Unicode standardizes text across devices and defines levels of technical language support, from basic typing to advanced services like speech recognition and translation.
- How does Apple collaborate with communities for language support?Apple collaborates with community members and experts to develop language support, as seen in their work with the Cherokee Nation.
- What is the Iriaith project?The Iriaith project, funded by the Welsh Government, collected English-Welsh sentences to train AI and translation models and developed Welsh-language AI models.
- How does Te Hiku Media handle Māori language data?Te Hiku Media uses a community license for its Māori language data, ensuring projects benefit Māori people and retain ownership of derived works.
