Managing Bilingual Keyboards

With iOS 18 Apple has added a new bilingual keyboards feature. This note explains how to set them up and how to get rid of them.

Setup

To set up a bilingual keyboard, starting for example from English, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard and choose the language you want to add. If a bilingual option is possible, you will get dialogue where you can choose between "Add to English Keyboard" and "Add New Keyboard". For bilingual, choose "Add to English Keyboard".

Then you should see a keyboard on this list with two names, for example "English & French" if you had English to start with and added French. Tap on that to get a choice of the layout which should appear on the screen, for example "QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, AZERTY-French, QWERTY-French". Check the one you want. The layout you choose can be used to type either of the two languages without changing anything. The English layouts have all the extra characters needed for French available via Press and Hold on their keys.

Note that bilingual keyboards can be especially useful for the Languages of India.

Removal

If you had, for example, English and French keyboards active before you updated to iOS 18, the update may have combined them into a single keyboard called "English & French", with "EN FR" showing faintly on the lower right corner of the space bar. The Globe key which you used to switch keyboards may have disappeared, because you now only have one keyboard instead of two.

To go back to the way it used to be, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard and add both English and French separately. When doing that, watch the dialogue that pops up. If you are offered a choice between "Add to English (or French) Keyboard" and "Add New Keyboard", choose "Add New Keyboard". Then use the Edit button to remove "English & French".