Every Language Apple's Live Text Can Read (The Full List, From Apple)

Search for which languages Live Text supports and you’ll find a number repeated across dozens of articles: thirteen. One of the pages currently ranking for it was published in 2021.

Apple’s own feature availability page for iOS 26 lists 46 language-and-region combinations. Those resolve to 24 distinct languages.

The list, as Apple publishes it

Cantonese (China mainland), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (India), English (Ireland), English (Malaysia), English (New Zealand), English (Philippines), English (Saudi Arabia), English (Singapore), English (South Africa), English (United Arab Emirates), English (United Kingdom), English (United States), French (Belgium), French (Canada), French (France), French (Luxembourg), French (Switzerland), German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (Nynorsk + Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (United States), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Collapsed to languages rather than regions: Cantonese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

The regional entries matter less than they look. English (India) and English (Ireland) aren’t different recognition models so much as different locale settings; the script is the same. Where the list genuinely earns its length is the non-Latin coverage: Japanese, Korean, Thai, both Chinese scripts, Cantonese, Russian and Ukrainian in Cyrillic.

What isn’t there

This is the part the “13 languages” articles never get to.

Arabic is not on the list. Neither is Hebrew, Persian or Urdu. That’s a substantial share of the world’s printed text, and it’s the single most common surprise for people who assume an iPhone reads anything.

Greek is not on the list. Nor Hindi or any Devanagari script, nor Bengali or Tamil.

Several European languages are missing despite their neighbours being included: Finnish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian.

The pattern is roughly: Latin and Cyrillic scripts with large commercial markets, plus the major East Asian scripts. Right-to-left scripts and Indic scripts are the notable gap.

If your language is on the list but it still fails

Then it’s an image problem, and those are fixable. In rough order of how often they’re the cause:

Not enough of the frame. Text should fill most of the image. Crop before you scan rather than photographing a page from across a desk.

A steep angle. Recognition is built around straight-on views. Square up, or use a scanner app that corrects perspective before running OCR.

Low contrast. Pencil on cream paper, faded thermal receipts, grey text on white. Raising contrast in the Photos editor before extracting often rescues these.

Text that’s too small. Below a certain pixel height per character there’s nothing to recognise. Move closer rather than zooming after the fact.

If your language isn’t on the list

Here I have to give an answer that doesn’t help me.

A cloud OCR service is usually your best option. Google, Microsoft and the large model providers train on far more scripts than any on-device model, and for Arabic, Devanagari or Greek they will simply work better. The trade-off is that the image is uploaded, so weigh it against what’s in the document. I’ve written separately about what four free online OCR sites say they do with your uploads.

A third-party iPhone app will not rescue you. This is the part worth being blunt about. Most iOS OCR apps, Textora included, are built on the same Apple Vision framework that powers Live Text. They inherit its language support. An app promising ninety languages of on-device recognition on iPhone is promising something the underlying framework does not provide.

Textora recognises twelve languages: English, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Ukrainian. That is fewer than Live Text, not more. Where it adds something is batch scanning, a searchable history and translation of the extracted text into 29 languages, none of which Live Text does. But on the specific question this article is about, language coverage, the free built-in tool is ahead.

Why the wrong number spread

Live Text launched in 2021 supporting seven languages. Apple has added to it in most releases since. Articles written in 2021 and 2022 were accurate when published and were never updated, and later articles copied them.

It’s a good reminder to check the date on anything that gives you a number, including this. Apple’s feature availability page is the source that stays current; this list was taken from it on 9 August 2026.

I build Textora, a free on-device OCR app, and this article concludes that Apple’s built-in tool covers more languages than mine does. The language list above is quoted from Apple’s own page on the date given. If Apple has since updated it, email support@textora.app and I’ll refresh this and note what changed.

Sources: Apple — iOS and iPadOS feature availability