How to change system language on Windows 10

Source: Windows Central

On Windows 10, the initial setup process offers you the option to set the default language. However, if you made a mistake or using a device already configured, you don’t have to struggle with the incorrect settings when your requirements are different.

If you have to change your device’s language settings, you can complete this task using the Settings app without reinstalling Windows 10.

In this Windows 10 guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to change your device’s system default language.

How to change default system language on Windows 10

If you’re using a computer with the incorrect language configuration, it’s unnecessary to reinstall Windows 10. You only need to adjust a few settings to set the appropriate language.

Disable language sync

On Windows 10 configured with a Microsoft account, the language preferences will sync across devices. In the case that you only need the settings on one computer, it’s recommended to disable the option to sync the language settings before making any changes to prevent the new configuration from overwriting the settings on your other devices.

To stop syncing the language preferences on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Settings.
2. Click on Accounts.
3. Click on Sync your settings.

Under the «Individual sync settings» section, turn off the Language preferences toggle switch.

Source: Windows Central

Once you complete the steps, you can change the language settings without affecting your other devices.

Change language settings

To change the system default language, close running applications, and use these steps:

1. Open Settings.
2. Click on Time & Language.
3. Click on Language.

Under the «Preferred languages» section, click the Add a language button.

Source: Windows Central

Select the language package from the result.

Source: Windows Central

Check the Set as my display language option.

Source: Windows Central

Click the Yes, sign out now button.

Source: Windows Central

After you complete the steps, the display language will change across the entire Windows 10 experience, including the Sign-in screen, Settings app, File Explorer, Desktop, apps, browser, and websites you visit. Depending on your new settings, Windows 10 may prompt you to review your privacy settings again.

Change region settings

In the case that you are adjusting the Windows 10 language because you’re now in a different region, you’ll also need to change the region settings.

To change the local region settings on Windows 10, use these steps:

1. Open Settings.
2. Click on Time & Language.
3. Click on Region.

Use the «Country or region» drop-down menu to select the current location (if applicable).

Source: Windows Central

Under the «Related settings» section, click the Administrative language settings option on the right side.

Source: Windows Central

Under the «Language for non-Unicode programs» section, click the Change system locale button.

Source: Windows Central

Select the new system local by specifying the new language.

Source: Windows Central

In the «Administrative» tab, click the Copy settings button.

Source: Windows Central

Under the «Copy your current settings to» section, check the Welcome screen and system accounts and New user accounts options.

Source: Windows Central

Click the OK button.

Click the OK button again.

Click the Restart now button.

Once you complete the steps, the computer will now use the correct region settings.

Typically, users never have to worry about changing or installing additional languages. However, the ability to change language-related settings may come in handy for organizations working with people that need to use different preferences. It’s also a useful feature to match the local settings if you relocate to another region or when buying a new device that ships from a different country.

The only caveat about changing the region settings is that you may lose access to Cortana, and the Microsoft Store may show different contents depending on the region you specified.

More Windows 10 resources

For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources:

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Available languages for Windows

The following tables show the supported language packs for Windows 10 and Windows Server, and supported language interface packs (LIPs) for Windows 10. LIPs are available for Windows 10, but are not available for Windows Server. For more information, see Language packs.

The version of the language, LIP, or Feature on Demand must match the version number. For example, you can neither add a Windows 10 version 1809 LIP to Windows 10 version 1803 image, nor add a Windows Server 2019 language pack to Windows Server 2016.

You cannot add languages to Windows 10 Home Single Language and Windows 10 Home Country Specific editions.

To learn how to add languages to Windows, or where to get them, see Where to get language packs and LIPs.

For a complete list of supported languages and locales, see Locale Identifier Constants and Strings.

Supported Language Packs and Language Interface Packs

The following tables include these settings:

• Language/region— The name of the language that will be displayed in the UI. All 38 language packs are available for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. In Windows Server 2012 the user interface (UI) is localized only for the 18 languages listed in bold.
• Language/region tag— The language identifier based on the language tagging conventions of RFC 3066. This setting is used with the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool, or in an unattended answer file.
• Language/region ID— The hexadecimal representation of the language identifier. This setting is used with the keyboard identifier when specifying an input method using DISM.
• Language/region decimal identifier— The decimal representation of the language identifier. This setting is used in Oobe.xml.

Language Packs

Language/region	Language/region tag	Language/region ID	Language/region decimal ID
Arabic (Saudi Arabia)	ar-SA	0x0401	1025
Bulgarian (Bulgaria)	bg-BG	0x0402	1026
Chinese (Hong Kong SAR)	zh-HK

Note:В No longer used. See zh-TW.

0x0c04 3076 Chinese (PRC) zh-CN 0x0804 2052 Chinese (Taiwan) zh-TW 0x0404 1028 Croatian (Croatia) hr-HR 0x041a 1050 Czech (Czech Republic) cs-CZ 0x0405 1029 Danish (Denmark) da-DK 0x0406 1030 Dutch (Netherlands) nl-NL 0x0413 1043 English (United States) en-US 0x0409 1033 English (United Kingdom) en-GB 0x0809 2057 Estonian (Estonia) et-EE 0x0425 1061 Finnish (Finland) fi-FI 0x040b 1035 French (Canada) fr-CA 0x0c0c 3084 French (France) fr-FR 0x040c 1036 German (Germany) de-DE 0x0407 1031 Greek (Greece) el-GR 0x0408 1032 Hebrew (Israel) he-IL 0x040d 1037 Hungarian (Hungary) hu-HU 0x040e 1038 Italian (Italy) it-IT 0x0410 1040 Japanese (Japan) ja-JP 0x0411 1041 Korean (Korea) ko-KR 0x0412 1042 Latvian (Latvia) lv-LV 0x0426 1062 Lithuanian (Lithuania) lt-LT 0x0427 1063 Norwegian, BokmГҐl (Norway) nb-NO 0x0414 1044 Polish (Poland) pl-PL 0x0415 1045 Portuguese (Brazil) pt-BR 0x0416 1046 Portuguese (Portugal) pt-PT 0x0816 2070 Romanian (Romania) ro-RO 0x0418 1048 Russian (Russia) ru-RU 0x0419 1049 Serbian (Latin, Serbia) sr-Latn-CS

Note: No longer used. See sr-Latn-RS.

0x081a 2074 Serbian (Latin, Serbia) sr-Latn-RS 0x241A 9242 Slovak (Slovakia) sk-SK 0x041b 1051 Slovenian (Slovenia) sl-SI 0x0424 1060 Spanish (Mexico) es-MX 0x080a 2058 Spanish (Spain) es-ES 0x0c0a 3082 Swedish (Sweden) sv-SE 0x041d 1053 Thai (Thailand) th-TH 0x041e 1054 Turkish (Turkey) tr-TR 0x041f 1055 Ukrainian (Ukraine) uk-UA 0x0422 1058

Language interface packs (LIPs)

Except where noted, the following LIPs are available for Windows 10. For Windows Server, options to change keyboard and regional settings such as currency, time zones, and time/date format are available but LIPs are not available. For more information, see Language packs.

As of Windows 10, version 1809, LIPs are are distributed as .appx files. To learn how to add an .appx, see Add languages to Windows.

Understand user profile languages and app manifest languages

A Windows user can use Settings > Time & Language > Region & language to configure an ordered list of preferred display languages, or just a single preferred display language. A language can have a regional variant. For example, you can select Spanish as spoken in Spain, Spanish as spoken in Mexico, Spanish as spoken in the United States, among others.

Also in Settings > Time & Language > Region & language, but separate from language, the user can specify their location (known as region) in the world. Note that the display language (and regional variant) setting isn’t a determiner of the region setting, and vice versa. For example, a user might be currently living in France but choose a preferred Windows display language of EspaГ±ol (MГ©xico).

For Windows apps, a language is represented as a BCP-47 language tag. For example, the BCP-47 language tag «en-US» corresponds to English (United States) in Settings. Appropriate Windows Runtime APIs accept and return string representations of BCP-47 language tags.

The following three sections define the terms «user profile language list», «app manifest language list», and «app runtime language list». We’ll be using these terms in this topic and other topics in this feature area, so it’s important to know what they mean.

User profile language list

The user profile language list is the name of the list that’s configured by the user in Settings > Time & Language > Region & language > Languages. In code you can use the GlobalizationPreferences.Languages property to access the user profile language list as a read-only list of strings, where each string is a single BCP-47 language tag such as «en-US» or «ja-JP».

App manifest language list

The app manifest language list is the list of languages for which your app declares (or will declare) support. This list grows as you progress your app through the development lifecycle all the way to localization.

The list is determined at compile time, but you have two options for controlling exactly how that happens. One option is to let Visual Studio determine the list from the files in your project. To do that, first set your app’s Default language on the Application tab in your app package manifest source file ( Package.appxmanifest ). Then, confirm that the same file contains this configuration (which it does by default).

Each time Visual Studio produces your built app package manifest file ( AppxManifest.xml ), it expands that single Resource element in the source file into a union of all the language qualifiers that it finds in your project (see Tailor your resources for language, scale, high contrast, and other qualifiers). For example, if you’ve begun localizing and you have string, image, and/or file resources whose folder or file names include «en-US», «ja-JP», and «fr-FR», then your built AppxManifest.xml file will contain the following (the first entry in the list is the default language that you set).

The other option is to replace that single «x-generate» element in your app package manifest source file ( Package.appxmanifest ) with the expanded list of elements (being careful to list the default language first). That option involves more maintenance work for you, but it might be an appropriate option for you if you use a custom build system.

To begin with, your app manifest language list will only contain one language. Perhaps that’s en-US. But eventually—as you either manually configure your manifest, or as you add translated resources to your project—that list will grow.

When your app is in the Microsoft Store, the languages in the app manifest language list are the ones that are displayed to customers. For a list of BCP-47 language tags specifically supported by the Microsoft Store, see Supported languages.

In code you can use the ApplicationLanguages.ManifestLanguages property to access the app manifest language list as a read-only list of strings, where each string is a single BCP-47 language tag.

App runtime language list

The third language list of interest is the intersection between the two lists that we’ve just described. At runtime, the list of languages for which your app has declared support (the app manifest language list) is compared with the list of languages for which the user has declared a preference (the user profile language list). The app runtime language list is set to this intersection (if the intersection is not empty), or to just the app’s default language (if the intersection is empty).

More specifically, the app runtime language list is made up of these items.

1. (Optional) Primary Language Override. The PrimaryLanguageOverride is a simple override setting for apps that give users their own independent language choice, or apps that have some strong reason to override the default language choices. To learn more, see the Application resources and localization sample.
2. The user’s languages that are supported by the app. This is the user profile language list filtered by the app manifest language list. Filtering the user’s languages by those supported by the app maintains consistency among software development kits (SDKs), class libraries, dependent framework packages, and the app.
3. If 1 and 2 are empty, then the default or first language supported by the app. If the user profile language list doesn’t contain any languages that the app supports, then the app runtime language is the first language supported by the app.

In code you can use the ResourceContext.QualifierValues property to access the app runtime language list in the form of a string containing a semicolon-delimited list of BCP-47 language tags.

You can also access it as a read-only list of strings, each containing a single BCP-47 language tag. You can use the ResourceContext.Languages property or the ApplicationLanguages.Languages property to do this.

The app runtime language list determines the resources that Windows loads for your app and also the language(s) used to format dates, times, numbers, and other components. See Globalize your date/time/number formats.

Note If the user profile language and the app manifest language are regional variants of one another, then the user’s regional variant is used as the app runtime language. For example, if the user prefers en-GB and the app supports en-US, then the app runtime language is en-GB. This ensures that dates, times, and numbers are formatted more closely to the user’s expectations (en-GB), but localized resources are still loaded (due to language matching) in the app’s supported language (en-US).

Qualify resource files with their language

Name your resource files, or their folders, with language resource qualifiers. To learn more about resource qualifiers, see Tailor your resources for language, scale, high contrast, and other qualifiers. A resource file can be an image (or other asset), or it can be a resource container file, such as a .resw that contains text strings.

Note Even resources in your app’s default language must specify the language qualifier. For example, if your app’s default language is English (United States), then qualify your assets as \Assets\Images\en-US\logo.png .

• Windows performs complex matching, including across regional variants such as en-US and en-GB. So include the region sub-tag as appropriate. See How the Resource Management System matches language tags.
• Specify a language script sub-tag in the qualifier when there is no Suppress-Script value defined for the language. For example, instead of zh-CN or zh-TW, use zh-Hant, zh-Hant-TW, or zh-Hans (for more detail, see the IANA language subtag registry).
• For languages that have a single standard dialect, there is no need to include the region qualifier. For example, use ja instead of ja-JP.
• Some tools and other components such as machine translators might find specific language tags, such as regional dialect info, helpful in understanding the data.

Not all resources need to be localized

Localization might not be required for all resources.

• At a minimum, ensure all resources exist in the default language.
• A subset of some resources might suffice for a closely related language (partial localization). For example, you might not localize all of your app’s UI into Catalan if your app has a full set of resources in Spanish. For users who speak Catalan and then Spanish, the resources that are not available in Catalan appear in Spanish.
• Some resources might require exceptions for specific languages, while the majority of other resources map to a common resource. In this case, mark the resource intended to be used for all languages with the undetermined language tag ‘und’. Windows interprets the ‘und’ language tag as a wildcard (similar to ‘*’) in that it matches the top app language after any other specific match. For example, if a few resources are different for Finnish, but the rest of the resources are the same for all languages, then the Finnish resource should be marked with the Finnish language tag, and the rest should be marked with ‘und’.
• For resources that are based on a language script, such as a font or height of text, use the undetermined language tag with a specified script: ‘und- ‘. For example, for Latin fonts use und-Latn\\fonts.css and for Cyrillic fonts use und-Cryl\\fonts.css .

Set the HTTP Accept-Language request header

Consider whether the web services that you call have the same extent of localization as your app does. HTTP requests made from Windows apps in typical web requests, and XMLHttpRequest (XHR), use the standard HTTP Accept-Language request header. By default, the HTTP header is set to the user profile language list. Each language in the list is further expanded to include neutrals of the language and a weighting (q). For example, a user’s language list of fr-FR and en-US results in an HTTP Accept-Language request header of fr-FR, fr, en-US, en («fr-FR,fr;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.5,en;q=0.3»). But if your weather app (for example) is displaying a UI in French (France), but the user’s top language in their preference list is German, then you’ll need to explicitly request French (France) from the service in order to remain consistent within your app.

APIs in the Windows.Globalization namespace

Typically, the APIs in the Windows.Globalization namespace use the app runtime language list to determine the language. If none of the languages has a matching format, then the user locale is used. This is the same locale that is used for the system clock. The user locale is available from Settings > Time & Language > Region & language > Additional date, time, & regional settings > Region: Change date, time, or number formats. The Windows.Globalization APIs also have overrides to specify a list of languages to use, instead of the app runtime language list.

Using the Language class, you can inspect details about a particular language, such as the script of the language, the display name, and the native name.

Use geographic region when appropriate

In Settings > Time & Language > Region & language > Country or region, the user can specify their location in the world. You can use this settings, instead of language, for choosing what content to display to the user. For example, a news app might default to displaying content from this region.

Using the GeographicRegion class, you can inspect details about a particular region, such as its display name, native name, and currencies in use.

Examples

The following table contains examples of what the user would see in your app’s UI under various language and region settings.

App manifest language list	User profile language list	App’s primary language override (optional)	App runtime language list	What the user sees in the app
English (GB) (default); German (Germany)	English (GB)	none	English (GB)	UI: English (GB) Dates/Times/Numbers: English (GB)
German (Germany) (default); French (France); Italian (Italy)	French (Austria)	none	French (Austria)	UI: French (France) (fallback from French (Austria)) Dates/Times/Numbers: French (Austria)
English (US) (default); French (France); English (GB)	English (Canada); French (Canada)	none	English (Canada); French (Canada)	UI: English (US) (fallback from English (Canada)) Dates/Times/Numbers: English (Canada)
Spanish (Spain) (default); Spanish (Mexico); Spanish (Latin America); Portuguese (Brazil)	English (US)	none	Spanish (Spain)	UI: Spanish (Spain) (uses default since no fallback available for English) Dates/Times/Numbers Spanish (Spain)
Catalan (default); Spanish (Spain); French (France)	Catalan; French (France)	none	Catalan; French (France)	UI: Mostly Catalan and some French (France) because not all the strings are in Catalan Dates/Times/Numbers: Catalan
English (GB) (default); French (France); German (Germany)	German (Germany); English (GB)	English (GB) (chosen by user in app’s UI)	English (GB); German (Germany)	UI: English (GB) (language override) Dates/Times/Numbers English (GB)

For a list of standard country/region codes used by Microsoft, see the Official Country/Region List.