Type Two Languages at Once, Without Reaching for the Globe Key

“At once” means one dictionary, not two modes

Every keyboard on earth lets you install two languages. The question nobody asks is what the corrector can see while you are halfway through a word. On most keyboards the answer is: one language, the one you last selected. The other one is sitting behind a globe key, and until you press it, every word you type from it is a typo as far as the software is concerned.

Quill Flow builds a single word list out of both languages, with each language’s word frequencies rescaled so the smaller corpus is not buried under the larger one. English and Spanish together come out at 124,391 words. In that merged list gracias lands at rank 109 and hola at 141, which is to say: right where the corrector will find them instantly, not somewhere in the tail where they would lose every contest against an English near-match.

The practical version of that: you can swipe a Spanish word across an English keyboard and it comes out as the Spanish word. You can type manana and get mañana. You never tell it which language you are in, because it is in both.

How to turn it on

1. 1Open Languages, then KeyboardIn the Quill Flow app, go to Settings and then Languages. The Keyboard tab is the typing side, separate from the dictation languages.
2. 2Tap a second languageWhichever you already had stays marked Primary. The new one joins it. The Add pill dims once you have two, because two is the cap.
3. 3Check your space barIn a real text field the space bar now reads something like English · Español. That label is how you know both are live rather than one being queued behind the other.
4. 4Reorder whenever you likeLong-press either language and choose Make primary. The primary decides the board you see: its layout (QWERTY, AZERTY, or QWERTZ) and the accents under a long press.

Which pairs actually type together

Two languages share a keyboard when they share a script. That covers 16 of our 19 keyboard languages:

English (US), English (India), Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), French, German, Italian, Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Turkish.

Pick any two and you get the merged dictionary. Hindi, Korean, and Russian are the exceptions, because Devanagari, Hangul, and Cyrillic do not share a keyboard with the Latin alphabet. You can still select one of them alongside a Latin language; the keyboard then serves one at a time and you flip between them from the settings drawer, the same way it has always worked.

We would rather say that plainly than let you find out. A bilingual keyboard that quietly does nothing for your particular pair is worse than one that tells you up front.

The hard part is not merging. It is the collisions.

English autocorrect knows that dont should be don’t. French knows that dont is an extremely common relative pronoun. Merge the two naively and you have built a keyboard that corrupts French sentences on behalf of English.

So every forced correction gets checked against the other language before it survives. A rule is dropped when its trigger is a genuinely common word on the other side, measured against real corpus frequency rather than a membership test. What that produces on the shipped language packs:

That Spanish row is the one that matters most, because English and Spanish is far and away the most common pairing we see. A simple “is this a word in the other language?” check would have killed the automatic capitalization of a lone i for every Spanglish typist on the service, on the strength of a stray i that only shows up in Spanish subtitle transcripts. The frequency threshold is what saves it.

Why two, and not five

An honest answer: memory. A keyboard on iOS is an extension, and iOS gives extensions a fraction of the memory an app gets, then kills them without warning when they cross it. The second merged language costs roughly 8 to 12 MB of resident memory. A third would not fit with any margin on the phones that are already closest to the ceiling, which are exactly the older devices we work hardest to support.

SwiftKey offers five. We would rather ship two that genuinely share a corrector than five that have to be thinned to fit. If five languages at once is your requirement, that is a real reason to prefer it, and we say so on the SwiftKey comparison.

What about Apple’s built-in bilingual keyboard?

Credit where it is due: iOS 18 added bilingual keyboards to Apple’s own keyboard, and they work. If all you need is two languages on the stock keyboard, you already have it, for free, with nothing to install.

Two differences. Apple’s version runs on a curated list of pairs, and its own documentation is explicit that not all languages can be combined; ours is any two of the 16Latin-script languages, so the pairing rule is a property of the alphabet rather than of a list somebody maintains. And Apple’s keyboard is Apple’s keyboard: no AI dictation in 100+ languages, no 19 rewrite tones, no personal dictionary, no themes. Bilingual typing is one feature of a keyboard, not the whole keyboard.

Spanglish, Hinglish, and everything in between

Code-switching is not an edge case. Hundreds of millions of people write two languages in one message every day, and every one of them has learned to fight their keyboard about it.

English and Spanish is the flagship pair and the one we tuned hardest. Hinglish is a slightly different problem: it is Hindi written in the Latin alphabet, so the language you want is English (India), which is built for it, rather than pairing English with Hindi and getting a Devanagari board. Pair English (India) with English (US) or with any other Latin language and it behaves like any other pair.

What it costs

Nothing. Bilingual typing is not a Pro feature and there is no cap attached to it. Turn on a second language, keep using the free tier, and the corrector, the suggestion bar, and swipe typing all work across both from the first word.