When I wrote about switching to the Mac in July of 2023, I lamented the Mac’s lack of support for my language, Slovene. Apple has never gotten around to supporting many languages, but for Slovene, it all changed with iOS 18 and macOS 15. So I am writing this on my Mac Mini with the default language set to my native tongue.
Why did Apple do this after 18 years of iOS and a thousand years of the Mac? The simple answer is: Regulation works.
In April of last year, the Slovenian parliament passed a new version of The Public Use of the Slovenian Language Act stating that if you want to sell products in Slovenia, they must “speak” Slovene. Before I discuss the reasoning behind the law, it’s worth explaining why Apple’s past exclusion of Slovene was so unusual.
Windows to the world
Slovene being absent from Apple’s operating systems for so many years could seemingly be explained away by the fact that there are only about two million Slovene speakers in the world, so one might think, “Why bother?” But Apple’s competitors have bothered. Our language was among the first to be included in Windows 951. Linux has supported Slovene forever. Google has had the domain google.si for as long as I can remember. Android supported our language almost from the start. That takes care of most of the major operating systems, and Apple being the holdout is, well, weird.
I don’t mean to suggest that the other companies added Slovene support out of the goodness of their hearts. It arose from a combination of lobbying by Slovenians inside and outside the companies, and companies finding value in ever-so-slightly expanding their market share.2 And maybe, just maybe, there was a whiff of respect for the people you sell stuff to as well. They are known as your customers.
Good neighbors
Apple also clearly has people working on Slavic languages, so we’re not talking about something completely foreign to the company. Apple has supported Croatian, the language of our neighbor Croatia (also a former Yugoslavian republic), which has around 6.5 million speakers. While our languages are somewhat similar, they are not as closely related as Croatian and Serbian (also not supported), which, to the outside world, might as well be interchangeable. (That is a fraught sentiment considering the history of the region.3)
What all these languages do share are some of the “extra” letters, such as č, ć , š , ž, and đ, and the omission of q, x, and y. Why people within Apple have never been able to convince their bosses to add these neighboring languages remains a genuine mystery.4
Serious about language
Going back to the two million or so speakers of Slovenian, I totally understand why everyone’s first instinct is to focus on the smallness of that number. In Slovenia, however, the fact that we have been able to preserve our own language is not just a point of pride or some sort of “Slovenia first” sentiment.5
I asked Kozma Ahačič, head of the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language6, how Slovenia was able to hold on to its language:
Language is not just a tool, but also a way of thinking and a way of life. Slovene established and preserved itself as a literary language due to its strong unifying power. Some nations are connected by slogans, others by architectural symbols or the memory of great global figures — we are connected by language. So the question you asked is not apt: it was not we who were able to hold on to our language, but rather it was the language that preserved us.
Just to drive the point home, I also asked my friend, co-host and translator Boštjan Gorenc7 to explain the history of our language:
Because of a peculiar historical situation, never having our own nation-state until 1991, we latched on to the Slovene language to serve as our foundation. The language was not seen just as means of communication but also as an act of defiance under different rulers from the Habsburg monarchy to Italian and German oppressors during World War II. In Yugoslavia, it was recognized as one of the official languages, but it still had to endure the pressures of making Serbo-Croatian the only official language of the federation.
The origins of the Slovene language go much further back, and the language has an impressive resume. Gorenc again:
The Slovene language lived among the common folk and prospered, having seen its first heyday in the reformation period with its first book in 1550, and a few years later being the 12th modern language with the complete translation of the Bible and getting the 9th modern grammar in the world. So even though the language wasn’t among the largest, it held its own in comparison with its bigger brethren.”
The twelfth modern language to receive a translation of the Bible, but we had to pass a law to get macOS translated into Slovene. Weird, right?
Law of the land
Now, about that law. The one person who could say why exactly the law got amended is the Head of our Ministry of Culture, so I asked her. Here is Culture Minister Asta Vrečko explaining the reasoning behind the law:
Soon after the start of our term (June 1, 2022), we received several inquiries from the public and the media regarding why some popular products and services were still not available in Slovene. The most frequently mentioned were Apple products and on-demand video streaming services such as Netflix, Disney, and similar platforms.8 The providers cited the small size of the Slovene language, arguing that translation was not worthwhile. This was unacceptable to us, so the ministry formed a working group to revise The Public Use of the Slovenian Language Act and added new requirements for providers of devices that are now essential for accessing and using information society services: computers and smartphones, connected cars, smart televisions, and the like. Therefore, we unequivocally stated in the law that support for Slovene can no longer depend solely on the goodwill of providers and their business model, but is mandatory. We are pleased that providers have mostly positively accepted our step as a legitimate demand from the state and citizens to support and respect our mother tongue in this way as well.
Final word
Apple deserves considerable praise for its attention to detail. Examples like the Apple pencil shadow, Apple’s breathing light, or the Mac Pro with no wires are just a sample of evidence that shows a company going above and beyond to delight its users. I imagine there must have been a meeting at some point where the topic was “Apple Pencil shadows,” and it occurred voluntarily. The meeting to include Slovene was likely convened because of a law, and I bet lawyers were present.
There is a word that is overused (I am also guilty of this) when Apple ships a seemingly obvious feature that “should have been included sooner.” The use of this word is rarely warranted, and its use here has been cheapened by Apple’s behavior, since it added Slovene because it respected the law 9, not its Slovenian customers. Still, it is the only word fitting for this occasion.
Končno.10
[Anže Vidrih Tomić is a tech journalist and podcaster from Slovenia where he works in public radio. He also writes about tech and games. He shows up on The Incomparable and Clockwise podcasts and after work runs an indie podcast network.]
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