I am bilingual and want my iPhone to understand me when I switch between english and spanish. So I started browsing the all the new settings that have been added in the recent software updates. To my delight I was able to find out the iPhone now supports multiple languages by adding an International button right next to the space bar. Press that button and your keyboard changes to the next language you had pre-selected. You can then type and enjoy dictionary and auto-correction on the selected language. Press the International button again and you are back on english keyboard. Brilliant. The following is a short tutorial on how to set this up.
Step 1: From the Dashboard choose Settings
Step 2: From Settings choose General Settings
Step 3: From General Settings choose International
Step 4: From International choose Keyboards
Step 5: From Keyboards turn on the desired languages
Usage:
Go back to the Dashboard and launch an application that uses the keyboard. If you stay in the default english keyboard, when you start typing a spanish word you will get the auto-correction hints based on the english dictionary. But now we have an International button next to the space bar to switch the keyboard language.
Press the International button next to the space bar to switch to the next language in line. The name of the language is displayed briefly in the space bar and then the the word “space” gets changed to the selected language equivalent.
Now, try typing again and you will notice the auto-correction hints will be based on the language dictionary. Press the international button again when you want to return to english typing.
Conclusion: When using roman languages it is not as easy mac os x multiple languages but if dealing with non-roman languages this is a brilliant implementation. I’m sure my mom will hate the fact that Ican do spanglish on my iPhone, but at least I will spell both correctly.
Hello, I am Melvin Rivera; creator of 
Follow me @
nice tip homie! this is key, down here, especially with sms. I’m constantly switching back and forth between eng/span. now if you’ll just give me your 2g phone for a low low price, I’ll be happy to “test” the phone down here.
Oh and Telcel (the iphone carrier in mexico who has 75% total cellphone market share) has announced they’re going to sell the iphone sans-contract! yippee, only $850. epic fail. So essentially, they’re going to charge you roughly $350 to get the phone without a contract. Who loves Mexico?!
Thank you! I’ve been looking for that for ages…
THANK YOU!
I was wondering why I kept getting sometimes English, sometimes German suggestions, and struggled with French and Spanish words … now I know how to switch!
This is very good news. I had this setting on for a while but it didn’t seem to work properly so I switched it off again. However, my testing must have been faulty then. It works now. Finally. A bilingual iPhone. Yay!
Yay! Now I can irritate my family by sending messages in both English (which they know) and Japanese (which they don’t)
Now if it could only recognise when I’m typing in spanish or english and switch to the appropriate keyboard and auto spell checker….that would make my iphone bilingual.
Until then I shall constantly be typing in one language, looking occasionally at the screen only to find Id forgot to change keyboards and the auto-correction has turned my sentences – not so much into spanglish – more like pansplish…..