For those who haven’t read the blog post from my attendance at last year’s Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), you can get up to speed about a discussion that I had with an Apple localization engineer to add support for both Louisiana Creole and Cajun French into iOS. It was, I argued, not enough to simply rely on Canadian French or even less, Parisian French. Louisiana French speaking people would be best served by having native support for their indigenous languages right into the operating system.
I’m happy to report that the first step in that process has occurred. As of iOS 10 and macOS 10.12 Sierra, both Louisiana Creole (Kréyol La Lwizyàn) and Cajun French (Français Cadien) are recognized languages, and full language support will hopefully happen on both platforms before long.
I explained in my earlier blog post what this means, but I’ll recap here. Both languages have unique three letter codes within the ISO-639-3 standard (ISO is a world-wide standards organization that classifies and standard things like weights, units of measurement, and yes… languages. The code ‘frc’ is designated for Cajun French and ‘lou’ for Louisiana Creole. Technology companies that want to support multiple languages in their products use these codes for identification and tracking. Until iOS 10 and macOS 10.12 Sierra, these codes weren’t in Apple’s operating systems.
Now that they are there, it means that apps on either platform which take advantage of these languages can have them displayed. It does NOT mean that the operating system itself will appear in either language. System messages in iOS or macOS will not suddenly show up in Louisiana Creole or Cajun French because Apple has yet to do the work required to translate the myriad of system strings and text that are part of both operating systems into these languages. This takes time and effort, and there is no certainty as to when this will show up, but an Apple engineer indicated to me that the work is scheduled.
For now, you can prepare your Mac and iOS device to be ready for when this happens (and for apps that do have Cajun French or Louisiana Creole localization to give preference to these languages). Here are instructions for doing this on both platforms:
macOS 10.12 Sierra
Step 1. Bring up System Preferences on your Mac.

Step 2. Click the Language & Region button to get to that setting.
Step 3. Click the “+” button at the lower left of the window. When the drop down sheet appears, type: C-A-J and you should see Français cadien.
Step 4. Click the add button to add that language. You will get a dialogue asking if you want to make Cajun French as your primary language. Select the button on the right to confirm.
Step 5. After the drop down sheet goes away, click the “+” button again and when the drop down sheet appears, type L-O-U and click the Add button to add Louisiana Creole.
Step 6. You will get the same drop down sheet as in step 4. You can choose to make Louisiana Creole your preferred language, or keep Cajun French. Once done, your language preference will look something like this:
The ordering of the three languages in the above window is important — macOS will give preference to Louisiana Creole first, followed by Cajun French second. So if an app supports either or both of those languages, it will display any Louisiana Creole French text first, and if that fails, fall back to Cajun French text. If there are no localized resources in the app for that language, it will finally fall back to English.
iOS 10
Step 1. Go to the Settings app on your iOS device and tap the General button.
Step 2. In the subsequent pane, tap the Language & Region button.
Step 3. In the Language & region section, tap the “Other Languages…” button.
Step 4. In the new view, type the letters C-A-J at the top of the search bar to find Cajun French, then tap that language option.
Step 5. Select the “Prefer Cajun French” button at the bottom. Your iOS device screen will go black as it sets the new language preference.
Step 6. The languages screen appears again. This time type L-O-U in the search bar to find Louisiana Creole and select that language. You will again be asked if you prefer Louisiana Creole. Indicate so, and your iOS device’s screen will once again go black as it makes this change.
Assuming everything worked correctly, you should see both Louisiana Creole and Cajun French above the English iPhone language, similar to the screen below:
Now, your iOS device is set so that any app that localizes to either Louisiana Creole or Cajun French will display that language first as a matter of preference before English.
Again, I want to emphasize that if you’re hoping that all text that you see on your iOS device suddenly appears in these two French languages, you will be disappointed. This is because Apple has created translations for a very small subset of all of the languages that it officially recognizes. To illustrate this, tap the iPhone Language button (currently set to English). There you will see that the available languages are much, much less than when you were selecting the preferred language. Time will tell if/when Apple completes that work, but when that does happen, you can return to this screen and set your iPhone Language to either Cajun French or Louisiana Creole.
Nonetheless, this is an important first step in bringing first class support for these languages into Apple’s operating systems. Apple should be commended for this work, and I encourage you to email Apple’s CEO Tim Cook at tcook@apple.com to express how valuable and important this is to our culture.