Afrikaans Spell Check for macOS and iOS

Muppet Labs, Rants

How to add Afrikaans spell checking and dictionaries to macOS 10.14 and iOS 12…

I use Telegram Desktop a fair bit and it bugged me that Afrikaans spell checking was missing. Here is my current solution. I’m not sure it’s 100% tip-top, but it’s much better than it was.

For macOS…

System

System Preferences > Language and Region
Add Afrikaans under Preferred Languages

Dictionary

Download these, unzip and copy into ~/Library/Dictionaries.

Get one Afrikaans-English one and one English-Afrikaans. The bigger file sizes.

Open Dictionary.app, look in Preferences, enable the new dictionaries and move them into the order you want them.

Spell Check

Download en_af_ZA.zip, unzip, copy to ~/Library/Spelling. I found this on the translate.org.za site a few years back.

Settings > Keyboard > Text > Spelling drop down

Scroll down to “Set Up…” and enable Afrikaans.

Now set that drop down to Automatic by Language.

Copy files from the zip file to the base of ~/Library/Spelling, you might need to restart the Systems Preferences app.

For iOS…

System

Settings > General > Language and Region
Add Afrikaans under ‘Preferred Language Order’

SwiftKey

Install the SwiftKey app and enable Afrikaans.