iOS 9 brings support for Hinglish, more Indian languages

NEW DELHI: Apple released iOS 9, the latest iteration of its mobile OS on Wednesday night for a large number of iPhones, iPads, and the latest iPod Touch.

The new software brings a number of under-the-hood changes including performance tweaks, Siri improvements and deep linking between apps, among others.

Interestingly, the new software version also introduces new keyboards for Hinglish, Punjabi, Telugu, and Gujarati in addition to a new Hindi transliteration keyboard. It already supports Tamil, Begali, Marathi and Urdu.

Typing in Hindi has become simpler on iOS through the transliteration interface. Users can key in Hindi words in roman and the keyboard converts these directly to Hindi in Devanagri script.

The Hinglish keyboard offers spelling suggestions for both English and Hindi words keyed in roman. With auto-correct turned on, it even replaces the words with their correct spellings. While some third-party keyboards offer this functionality, the introduction of this feature indicates that Apple has acknowledged the need for these keyboards among its Indian users.

iOS 9 also brings support for a number of other Indian languages in apps and websites including a number of Hindi dialects such as Angika, Awadhi, Kurukh, Magahi, Maithili, Newari, and Santali. This implies websites and apps that feature these languages will render without any hiccups on iOS.