IOS 27 and iPadOS 27 now support Blackfoot, alongside Cherokee — which Apple first added in 2010, on the built-in keyboard. The update rolled out globally in September, but Apple highlighted the expansion this week ahead of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the US on Monday, October 14, 2026. No new hardware is involved. This is a software-level addition: users with compatible devices can enable the keyboards in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard. Once enabled, they can switch between languages using the globe icon on the keyboard bar. Same as any other language pack. No subscription. No cloud processing required for typing. Just local input support, including autocorrect and predictive text tuned for each language’s orthography. Blackfoot joins Cherokee, which has around 1,500 fluent speakers worldwide. Cherokee uses a syllabary of 85 characters (originally 86), each representing a spoken syllable, not a letter or phoneme. One mis-typed character changes the word entirely. That precision matters in classrooms like Oklahoma’s Cherokee Immersion School, where fifth-grade teacher Erlinda “Daksi” Soap uses the keyboard to help students record and replay their own pronunciation. Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee artist who collaborated directly with Apple engineers, helped adapt the syllabary for iOS. His work ensured the glyphs render correctly, scale properly across screen sizes, and integrate with system-level text handling. From Messages to Notes to third-party apps that use Apple’s native text APIs. The inclusion isn’t symbolic window-dressing. It’s functional infrastructure. For the Cherokee Nation, it’s part of a broader language revitalization strategy. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. Told Apple the tools help make Cherokee “relevant to the young people that are learning here.” That relevance shows up in lived outcomes: high-school graduate Olivia Daugherty, a 2024 alum of the immersion school, said her niece is now a first-language Cherokee speaker, “one of the first in a very long time.” Apple Support pages now include guidance for enabling and using these keyboards. Search “indigenous language keyboard” or “Cherokee keyboard iOS” on support.apple.com. No separate app is needed. No developer intervention required. It works out of the box on any device running iOS 27 or iPadOS 27, meaning iPhone 12 and later, iPad Air (4th gen) and later, iPad Pro models from 2021 onward, and iPad (10th gen) and newer. Apple has not announced further indigenous language additions beyond Blackfoot and Cherokee in this cycle. But the company confirmed to CNET that the engineering framework used for Cherokee. Developed with tribal linguists and educators, is now reusable for future expansions. Next steps depend on collaboration, not just code.