[torvaney]

Absolutely. This will be an even bigger issue for people texting in a second or third language (which I understand is quite common among countries and communities where feature phone use is high).

As I understand it, one of the big advantages of T9 had over other, more sophisticated forms of predictive text is that each word in the dictionary can be encoded in close to 1 byte. Given the constraints faced at the time, T9 feels to me like it is close to a local optimimum.