Languages overview

WM Keyboard's language catalogue holds 843 entries. Alongside the languages you'd expect are InScript variants, minority Cyrillic alphabets, and a dozen constructed languages. Every one you enable becomes a full input mode with its own layout, dictionary, and settings, and you move between them without leaving the keyboard.

Suggested languages

The Add language screen opens with a short Suggested for you group, so the language you came for is usually already on screen. Each row says why it's there: "One of the languages on your device", or "Many people type this language in Bangladesh". Tapping one adds it exactly like tapping a search result does.

Two things on the device feed that list, in this order:

• Your phone's language list (Settings → System → Languages), in your own preference order. Anything you've told Android you read is a strong signal that you type it too.
• Your region, which maps to the languages widely typed there. A Bangladeshi SIM suggests Bangla and Sylheti, an Indian one Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and so on.

Where a language has a Romanized variant, it sits directly under its own language: Banglish under Bangla, Hinglish under Hindi. Wanting one is a good reason to be shown the other. That holds even when the language itself is already on, because somebody typing Bangla is exactly the person who'd want Banglish offered.

Four things can say what your region is: the SIM's country, the network's country, your phone's time zone, and last the region attached to your locale. Only the first of them with anything to offer is used. They disagree more often than you'd think. A phone set to English (United Kingdom) sitting in Dhaka carries both BD and GB, and reading both would bury Bangla under Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. The SIM and the time zone say where the phone actually is, while a locale's region is very often just the ROM it shipped with.

Nothing else is read. The keyboard doesn't look at what you've typed, your contacts, your accounts, or which apps you have installed. None of this needs a permission, and no part of it leaves the device. See Permissions for the full accounting.

Suggestions stay suggestions: nothing is enabled until you tap it. A brand-new install is the one exception, since it starts out in the languages your phone is already set to. See What ships.

Adding a language

Tap Add language to search the whole registry. The screen that opens leads with the suggestions above the search results. The search box matches on endonym, English name, id, locale tag, and the names and ids of the layouts the language ships, so "german", "Deutsch", "de", "de-DE" and "QWERTZ" all find the same entry. Tap an unadded language and it's enabled immediately on its first layout, then that language's own screen opens so you can pick a different layout or turn on suggestions from another enabled language.

If the language has data to download (a word list, emoji keywords, an n-gram pack of word pairs, or any mix of the three) you're asked once, right there, with the rough size for the lot on the dialog. Download starts all of them in the background. Not now adds the language without them. Cancel backs out of the whole thing, for the tap that landed on the wrong row. Nothing is enabled until you answer, so Cancel really does leave your language list as it was. You can start any of them by hand later from the language's own screen. Emoji keywords also have an automatic download of their own, covered in Emoji search in your language, but the prompt is the one chance to get the word list at the same time.

Removing a language asks the mirror question when it has files on disk: delete its downloaded word list and keywords to get the storage back, or keep them for next time. The language goes either way, because the dialog is only about the files. Deleting the keywords also tells the automatic download to leave that language alone, so they don't quietly come back.

Language names in the list are shown as endonym · English, for example "বাংলা · Bangla" or "Русский · Russian". The native name comes first and the English name after it, so you can find a language whether or not you can already read its script. English itself is just "English", since repeating it would say nothing.

Typing a language in Latin letters

Fourteen languages (including Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, and Russian) have a separate Romanized entry in the catalogue: Banglish, Hinglish, Arabizi, Translit, and so on. These type on a plain Latin QWERTY layout and draw suggestions from a transliterated word list. Each one is its own selectable language rather than a mode switch on the native-script one. Bangla's own phonetic typing (Avro) is different again, and it's covered on Bangla.

Each language has its own screen

Tap any enabled language to reach its screen. Layouts, Dictionary and Emoji are always there. The rest of the groups appear only where they mean something, so most languages show four or five in all:

• Layouts: a toggle per layout the language ships. Bangla offers Avro, Probhat, and Jatiya. At least one layout has to stay enabled somewhere across your whole set, so the last one can't be switched off from here.
• Numerals: which digits the number row and keypad show while this language is active. Two options: the language's own digits (the default) or plain 0-9. This is set per language, so Arabic can show ٠-٩ while English next to it stays on 0-9. Languages that already use 0-9 don't get the group at all, and no language offers another language's digits, since nobody writes Bangla with Persian numerals.
• Also suggest from: appears once you have more than one language enabled. Toggle other enabled languages on to blend their words into suggestions while you type this one. Words pulled in this way are never autocorrected away.
• Dictionary, Emoji, and, for Chinese, Japanese, and Cantonese, a conversion-dictionary group. Between them they cover downloadable word lists, emoji keyword packs, and for those three languages a larger conversion dictionary plus script and input-scheme options. Downloadable dictionaries covers all three in full, and Chinese, Japanese & Korean covers Chinese and Japanese input specifically.
• Language data, a single button that fetches everything the language has to download at once, with the size for the lot printed on it. It's there for any language that has something to download, and the download managers skip whatever is already on disk.

Three more groups turn up on the languages that have them: Clusters on a conjunct script (see the note below), Spellings on Bangla, whose "Use known spellings" switch turns "tmr" into তোমার and "table" into টেবিল, and Style on the Fancy Text entry, which is where its 31 styles are listed.

A Remove button sits at the bottom once you have more than one language enabled. Removing a language turns off every layout that belongs to it.

Switching between enabled languages

Once more than one layout is enabled, cycle between them with the 🌐 key, a spacebar swipe, or by holding the spacebar and dragging to the one you want. Switching languages has the full detail, including the hold-drag picker and how the cycle order is set. That order is its own setting, Switch order on the Languages screen, and it reorders every enabled layout rather than every language. AZERTY and QWERTY keep separate slots in the cycle even though they're both "English."

Where languages show up outside the keyboard

Two settings on the Languages screen connect your language choices to the rest of Android. Both sit on the language list itself rather than on any per-language screen.

Remember language per app, under Per-app language, is off by default. Turn it on and the keyboard remembers which layout you last explicitly switched to in each app. Reopening that app's text field restores it, while apps you haven't picked a language in follow your last-used layout globally. A field that requires Latin input (a password box) or that advertises its own language to the keyboard still overrides the memory either way.

List languages in the Android switcher, under System language switcher, is off by default. Turn it on and every enabled layout is registered as an Android input-method subtype, so the system's "Choose input method" sheet lists each one and can switch directly to it. It starts off because that sheet draws a subtype's label in the same slot where it draws the name of a keyboard with no subtypes, so a single language name sitting there just reads as the keyboard's name. Left off, switching stays entirely inside the keyboard and Android sees no subtypes at all. Turn it on and a second toggle appears: Show app name first, off by default, which puts "WM Keyboard" ahead of the language in the switcher's label instead of after it.

Visarga on the colon key

Bengali (ঃ) and Devanagari (ः) both write a visarga that's drawn as a colon and does a different job. The symbol layers are one grid shared by every language, so there's no key to give it. It rides the long-press of the colon key instead, on every layout in those two scripts.

Conjunct clusters

A language on a script that forms conjunct clusters (Bengali, Devanagari, Tamil, Gurmukhi, and several others) gets a Clusters group on its own screen. Its Conjunct-aware backspace toggle is off by default, and turning it on makes one backspace remove a whole cluster like ক্ষ or क्ष instead of one code point at a time. It's per language, so you can have whole clusters go in one press in Bangla and code points in Hindi.

What ships

WM Keyboard ships 1,279 layouts in total, in three groups.

20 are built into the app: QWERTY, AZERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, Halmak, Avro, Probhat, Jatiya, and dedicated layouts for French, German, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Hindi. Two more boards put more than one letter on a key: T9 and Compact QWERTY. See Ambiguous layouts for how those two work.

397 more are bundled as individual layout files, one per language or variant that isn't among those 20.

The remaining 862 are key grids converted from the Keyman keyboards repository, which is where most of the long tail comes from. They're what takes the language count past 800. See Keyman layouts for what they are and what they can and can't do yet.

Which of them start enabled depends on your phone. A fresh install reads your phone's language list and turns on one layout per language it recognises, up to four, always including English. English is there because it's what fields that force plain ASCII fall back to: passwords, URLs, email addresses. A phone set to Bangla starts with Avro and QWERTY. A phone set only to English starts with QWERTY alone. Your region is not used here. Being somewhere is a reason to offer a language, not to switch your keyboard to it.

Every other language sits in the catalogue until you add it, loaded on demand, so a language you haven't picked yet costs nothing.

The long tail

Past the languages most keyboards cover, the catalogue reaches into territory most don't:

• Indic InScript layouts for Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Tamil (Tamil99), Sinhala (Wijesekara), Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Konkani, Maithili, Bodo, Dogri, and Bhojpuri.
• Minority Cyrillic alphabets: Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chechen, Ossetian, Yakut, Udmurt, Komi, Kalmyk, Tuvan, Buryat, Erzya, Mari, Adyghe, Kabardian, Abkhaz, Avar, Lezgian, and more.
• Ethiopic script for Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre; Syriac, Polytonic Greek, and classical Sanskrit and Latin for liturgical and historical typing; Thaana (Dhivehi), Tifinagh (Tamazight, Tachelhit), and N'Ko.
• Syllabaries: Cherokee has its own script, and Inuktitut types in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
• Constructed languages (twelve of them): the auxiliary-language family Esperanto, Interlingua, Ido, Interlingue, Novial, Lingua Franca Nova, Kotava, and Volapük, alongside Lojban, Klingon, Tolkien's Quenya, and Toki Pona.

The registry also carries a handful of entries that aren't spoken languages at all but behave like one in every setting on this page: IPA, musical notation, chorded Braille, and Morse code, plus a Unicode "fancy text" keyboard with 31 switchable styles. These get their own pages, Music, braille & Morse and Fancy text, because typing on them works differently enough to need separate walkthroughs.

Options

Languages & layouts

Everything on this page is reachable from the app's Languages screen, and the exhaustive setting-by-setting reference lives on Languages in the Settings reference. A few settings that touch languages live elsewhere:

• Emoji keyword downloads sit under Emoji / Emoji keywords and are covered on Emoji customization.
• Word-list downloads and custom dictionaries sit under Languages & layouts / (a language) / Dictionary and are covered on Downloadable dictionaries.
• Your own layouts, including edits of a shipped layout, live under Layout & size / Key layouts and are covered on Custom layouts & the layout editor.

Details & edge cases

• A language you haven't added yet isn't silently active. Only enabled layouts are ever offered on the 🌐 cycle or spacebar swipe. Everything else sits in the catalogue, unloaded, until you search for it and tap it.
• Dictionaries aren't tied to whether a language is "complete." Only English and Bangla bundle a built-in word list. Nearly every other language in the catalogue starts with zero suggestions beyond what you type, until you download or import one. See Downloadable dictionaries for exactly which languages have which.
• "Also suggest from" only adds words. It never demotes the language you're actually typing. Suggestions from a secondary language are blended in rather than swapped to, and they're exempt from autocorrect, so a word you meant to borrow doesn't get "corrected" back.
• Numerals change the glyphs, not the script. Switching Hindi from ०-९ to 0-9 leaves its dictionary, its layout, and the script its letters use alone. All it changes is which glyphs 0-9 show as and, depending on the field, which glyphs get committed.
• Romanized languages widen the catalogue's reach without doubling its content. Banglish, Hinglish, Arabizi, and the other eleven Romanized entries are dictionary-only variants: same underlying language, plain Latin QWERTY layout, transliterated suggestions.
• Per-app language memory and the system switcher are independent of each other. You can have Android list every layout as a subtype while per-app memory stays off, or the reverse. Turning one off doesn't touch the other.

Every language

All 352 registered languages. Filter by name, id or script; click a heading to sort.

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