Apple introduces support for new languages on the lock screen, keyboard, and search with iOS 18

Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas with extended support for multiple new languages across the lock screen, Siri, the keyboard, and search on iOS 18.

With the new update, you can now customize the lock screen to show time in different numerals with support for 12 languages: Arabic, Arabic Indic, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Meitei, Odia, Ol Chiki, and Telugu.

The keyboard on iOS gets a bunch of updates, including support for trilingual predictive typing across the system. You can see additional language scripts on the left and right of the suggestion field and switch between them easily. Plus, you can type in Latin text and get suggestions for all three languages based on your input without switching.

In the Messages app, if you have multiple threads going on in different languages, the keyboard will remember the last language you used for each thread. The trilingual keyboard supports English, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. Additionally, iOS 18 introduces support for a Korean and English multiscript keyboard.

Also included in iOS 18 is improved language search, allowing users to search for different spellings of similar-sounding words in that language. For instance, users can search for both “चंद्र” and “चन्द्र” in Hindi. The new language search is available for Assamese, Bangla, Devanagari, and Gujarati.