Making the iPhone Bilingual

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.