Hello Apple Keyboard / Internationalization team,
In the current beta, I noticed new keyboard support for Tuvan and Sakha. Thank you — this is very important for Cyrillic-based languages and their communities.
I also noticed improvements to the Russian keyboard long-press options, but some Cyrillic letters used by other languages still seem to be missing. For example, Ossetian uses Ӕ ӕ, and this character does not appear as a long-press option.
My questions are:
- Are there plans to expand the Russian keyboard long-press mappings to cover more Cyrillic-based languages?
- Is there a recommended way for language communities or developers to provide corpus/frequency data and character mappings to help improve keyboard support?
- Should this type of request be submitted through Feedback Assistant, Developer Forums, or another channel?
I have corpus-based frequency data and long-press mapping data for many Cyrillic-based languages and would be happy to share it if useful.
Thank you. Ali Kuzhuget
In the current beta, I noticed new keyboard support for Tuvan and Sakha. Thank you — this is very important for Cyrillic-based languages and their communities.
Hello! Thank you for your kind words. Language representation in the system keyboard is very important to us and I appreciate that you noticed and took the time to ask us questions about this.
I also noticed improvements to the Russian keyboard long-press options, but some Cyrillic letters used by other languages still seem to be missing. For example, Ossetian uses Ӕ ӕ, and this character does not appear as a long-press option.
I answered your previous question here but I’ll add some more details below.
Are there plans to expand the Russian keyboard long-press mappings to cover more Cyrillic-based languages?
Please file a feedback request with what Cyrillic based languages you’d like to see better language support for! This helps us understand what’s missing from the current system experience and how to move forward.
Is there a recommended way for language communities or developers to provide corpus/frequency data and character mappings to help improve keyboard support? Should this type of request be submitted through Feedback Assistant, Developer Forums, or another channel?
Fantastic questions, we are always eager for language/keyboard related feedback from language communities and developers. Feedback Assistant would be the preferred venue to start any language or keyboard related requests, we’d appreciate the following information to make feedback as actionable as possible.
- Basic information about the language (name, writing system(s)/scripts, usage details)
- Core alphabet, any special characters used, etc.
- Feedback about the current input experience on our platforms with system keyboards
- Current keyboard layouts in use or 3rd party keyboard experiences
- the more details, the better!
I have corpus-based frequency data and long-press mapping data for many Cyrillic-based languages and would be happy to share it if useful.
Specifically, for your more detailed point about language corpora and frequency data for Cyrillic-based languages, we don't have a current venue for communities to share data with us, but we make use of Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). Contributing language data to CLDR allows us and other tech companies to leverage one source of truth while also not silo-ing or owning language data from a community. CLDR's Unilex is another project that could be relevant as well.
I’d appreciate if you could contact Developer Technical Support so we can start a conversation. Scroll all the way down at this page and use “Start your request”.
Thank you for your detailed questions, we appreciate the feedback and hope to hear more from you soon!