Thanks to free software designed by Vodafone and Foras na Gaeilge, you can now avail of predictive texting in Irish on your cell phone (or mobile phone, depending on your locale).

The Irish Times says that only about 80 of all the world’s languages are supported by predictive text (sometimes referred to as T9) software. So this announcement is a great move that should have a positive impact on the daily use of an teanga duchais (Irish to you) here in Ireland.

The software, called Téacs, means that Irish speakers can set their phones to prompt them from more than 25,000 Irish language words and phrases, with full grammatical support for all common terms when they begin to enter a text (or SMS) message.

Téacs is available at http://teacs.ie (note I have not tested it out yet and that although the software is free, the data transfer is not).



Don’t know what predictive texting is? Try this.