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:
