Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is an insult to the whole Cantonese speaking community.

Note: This letter is co-authored by friends of mine who would not like to be named, and I'm posting this on Medium for a wider reach. Hopefully someone from Apple will see this and take further action.

On WWDC 2021, Apple released a set of new features for iOS 15. Among which a new feature aroused people’s concern:

What is this supposed to mean? Even native Cantonese speakers are confused. Pinyin is a romanization system designed for Mandarin. Why type Cantonese and Shanghainese in Mandarin Pinyin? And what does it mean by “dialectal spellings”? For people who don’t know the languages, here is some background. Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin are three independent and mutually unintelligible languages. Each of them has its own writing system, grammar, vocabulary and romanization system. Their ISO 693–3 codes (international standard for classifying languages) are yue, wuu and cmn. Pinyin is the romanization system for Mandarin, not Cantonese nor Shanghainese. Cantonese has its own romanization system called Jyutping. But why would somebody type Cantonese in Mandarin Pinyin? We got the clarification some time later:

https://twitter.com/_karan/status/1401990241846652928

So things are clear: Apple is suggesting you typing Cantonese with a Mandarin keyboard. Excuse me? Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? Yes it is true that some Cantonese speakers living in mainland China use Pinyin to type Cantonese. But that is exactly because Apple doesn’t offer a Jyutping(Cantonese) keyboard, and they have to resort to this workaround. And now Apple says “You guys seem happy with this workaround, so we have made our Mandarin language model smarter to recognize your Cantonese dialectal spellings.” Oh yeah, creating “smarter” workarounds is always more expedient than solving the problem fundamentally.

You might say making a new keyboard layout is expensive and Apple doesn’t have the commitment? Fine. But when you look at the other features of iOS 15, things seem more confusing:

If it is the concern over workload or revenue, it still doesn’t make sense — Ainu is an endangered language and has less than 100 speakers globally, so we can possibly assume the work required to build the whole keyboard and dictionary for Ainu would be much much harder than Cantonese. Yet, Apple still managed to do it. Is this it? Is Apple done pretending to support linguistic diversity? Every language deserves to be preserved, if Apple really cares about the values they claim to behold, then why aren’t they supporting a Cantonese keyboard with Jyutping, the standard Romanization for Cantonese?

But we are more concerned about Apple’s attitude towards the Cantonese community. There has been numerous user feedbacks shouting out for the support of Jyutping keyboard.

As you expect, Apple never took them seriously, and now it turns into this trash. We urge Apple to take immediate actions to recognize and fulfill we Cantonese people’s needs. First off, Cantonese is not a dialect. Cantonese is not intelligible with Mandarin. Calling Cantonese a “dialectal spelling” of Mandarin is an extreme insult to the language and its speaking community. Second, Cantonese has it standard romanization system called Jyutping, which is the same as Pinyin to Mandarin. This should have been supported long ago yet Apple never addressed this issue. We urge Apple to support Jyutping at the earliest convenience. And more fundamentally, Cantonese should be added as a language option in later iOS versions.