Scribble and the Indian market
Scribble is the iPadOS feature that converts Apple Pencil handwriting into digital text in real time, usable in any system text field. With iPadOS 27, Apple adds support for Hindi and Marathi — respectively India's official language with the most native speakers and the official language of Maharashtra with over 80 million speakers.
Why it matters
Expanding Scribble to these languages is not just a technical update: it signals a strategic priority toward the Indian market, which Apple has identified as one of its main growth pools. Devanagari scripts — used by both Hindi and Marathi — have complex morphological characteristics (ligatures, overlapping vowel signs) that make handwriting recognition more difficult than Latin alphabets. Reaching sufficient quality for a public launch is a non-trivial achievement.
The broader linguistic context of WWDC 2026
The addition sits alongside other iOS 27 language announcements: new keyboards for Afrikaans, Baybayin, Guaraní, Luxembourgish, Xhosa, and Zulu, and new interface variants for English (Canada) and English (Philippines). Apple is building a broader linguistic ecosystem, with handwriting as a specific vector for languages with non-Latin scripts.