FirstVoices Keyboards — Free Mobile Keyboard Bringing 100+ Indigenous Languages to Everyday Digital Communication

Many Indigenous languages in Canada use characters, diacritics and syllabics not supported by standard smartphone keyboards, a barrier that has long forced First Nations, Métis and Inuit users — especially youth — to communicate online only in English or French. First Peoples' Cultural Council (FPCC), a First Nations-run BC Crown corporation, set out to remove that barrier at the operating-system level rather than app-by-app.
Developed over more than a year, including beta testing with 70 First Nations people, the free FirstVoices Keyboards app (iOS and Android) was launched on 16 May 2016 and announced by the BC government on 21 June 2016. Once installed, any of the 100+ custom keyboards — covering all 34 living First Nations languages and 61 dialects across British Columbia's 203 communities, plus languages in the rest of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand (including Māori) — can be activated system-wide, letting users type in their own language inside any app: email, social media, or messaging.
FPCC continued to invest in the underlying language-technology infrastructure after launch, partnering with the National Research Council of Canada to upgrade the FirstVoices Language Tutor and add predictive-text software and further keyboard layouts. No independent, population-level study of adoption or fluency impact was found; the evidence here is descriptive (official launch documentation and beta-testing figures) rather than an outcome evaluation, though the scale of language coverage — unmatched by any other single keyboard app at launch — is independently reported by government and media sources.

Read the full analysis: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2016ARR0041-001103