Windows 10: Language - Add, Remove, and Change in Windows 10

How to: Add, Remove, and Change Display Language in Windows 10

How to Add or Remove Language Packs and Change Display Language in Windows 10


Note Three first builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview were only available in English, Portuguese and Chinese. Finally last week the Build 9926 changed this and brought a long-awaited feature for us speakers of other languages and multilingual users alike. Windows 10 is now available in 25 languages, each of these languages can also be installed as additional display language in any other language version.

We "foreigners", ex-pats, immigrants and students abroad are not the only one sometimes in need of another language, wanting to change or add another Windows display language. A fellow Finn from back home when visiting me here in Germany could find and buy a nice laptop here but its Windows operating system would of course be in German. No worries, if it's Windows 8 or later OS he could have the Windows converted into Finnish within minutes after unsealing the box.

This tutorial will show you how to use Windows Language Packs in Windows 10, and how to change your Windows Display Language.

Contents:
One: Change Windows Display language with a Langue Pack
Two: Uninstall (remove) language packs


Here's the whole process in a short video tutorial:




One [/i] Change Windows Display language with a Langue Pack

1.) Sign in to Windows 10 using an administrative account. Go to Start Menu and click Settings:



2.) In Settings, select Time & Language, then Region & Language on the left pane, click Add Language on the right pane:





3.) Browse to language you want to add. Notice that languages are listed in alphabetical order according to the default Windows language, in this case English:



For instance my native language is Suomi but it's found not under S but instead under F according its English name Finnish.


4.) If the language you have selected has local variations, click the main language then select the one youd prefer from subselection. In my case now I want to add the French language spoken in France:



5.) When you have added the languages you need its time to install the Language Packs. Select a language, click Options:



6.) Click Download. Notice that downloading and installing a Language Pack can be quite slow and take up to 10 minutes even on a fast PC. The indicator shows you the progress:



7.) Go back to Language Selection page. Download all other language packs needed exactly as we just did with French.

If you want to change the language of the user account you are currently using, select a language, click then Set as Primary:



8.) To apply a display language change sign out from your user account and sign back in to Windows. As long as you stay logged in after changing the display language, Windows will use the old language only changing it in next sign in.


9.) If you want to change the language of another user account, sign in to that account first.


Note Notice that Windows allows you to select a different display language for each user account.

10.) For the purpose of this tutorial lets change the language for my Swedish (Test) account. I need to sign in to said account first, and then change the default display language English to a version of Swedish spoken in my native bilingual Finland. After signing in to said account, I'll do again steps 1 to 5 from above: Open Start Menu, click Settings, select Time & Language, then Region & Language on the left pane. On the right pane, click Add a Language and browse to the language you want to use, in this case now I select Swedish (Finland):




11.) Notice that the Swedish (Finland) Language Pack I want to use is already installed because I installed all Language Packs I need earlier at the same time while signed in to my main administrative account:



12.) Now its easy to change the display language for this user account. Select a language, click Set as Primary:



13.) Windows will now tell you that the language you have selected will be the new display language after next sign in:



14.) Sign out from your user account, sign back in. You will now see that Windows has changed the display language for this user account. The user account is now translated to your preferred language:




That's it!




Two [/i] Uninstall a language pack
The procedure for uninstalling language packs has remained the same as it was in Windows 8.1. Please see Option One, Step 6 in this tutorial at our sister site the Eight Forums: Language Pack - Install or Uninstall in Windows 8

Feel free to post your comments and questions in this thread .



Tip Applying a language pack to a user account does not change the Windows default system language used in Welcome, Sign In, Sign Out and Shutdown screens, Start Menu section titles and for Built-in Administrator account.

To change the default system language to other than Windows install language please see this tutorial:
How to Change Display Language in Windows 10
[*]How to Add a Language in Windows 10
[*]How to Remove a Language in Windows 10
[*]How to Change Region Location of Windows 10 for when Abroad
[*]How to Change Cortana Language in Windows 10
[*]How to Turn On or Off Website Access of Language List in Windows 10
[*]How to Turn On or Off Language Bar and Input Indicator in Windows 10
[*]How to Change System UI Language in Windows 10
[*]How to Force System UI Language as Display Language in Windows
[/list]

:)

 

How can I change Chinese Windows to English?

See:

How to Add or Remove Language Packs and change Display Language in Windows 10

[ Language - Add, Remove, and Change in Windows 10 ]

 

in the settings ,time and language,speech it is not showing any other language or options other then english(U.K.).what to do?

You need to add a language:

Language - Add, Remove, and Change in Windows 10
Hope that helps.

 

It is extremely demanding and time consuming, best to do in Audit Mode when customizing Windows install image. You need to install Windows ADK for WIndows 10: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/win.../dn913721.aspx. Scroll down the page, the Windows ADK download link is almost at the bottom of the page.

When done, herea reference for command line options: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib.../dn621905.aspx

 

Hello all,

I'm having trouble installing the English language pack on my laptop.
I live in Brazil and my computer's base language is Portuguese. I was running 8.1 in English but after updating to Windows 10, it only allows me to use the Portuguese display language. I followed the steps on here, downloaded the language pack, but keep running into the same problem. Windows tells me that "Only one language pack is allowed". I've set my region to the United States, set English as my default language, but still cannot set it as my display.





I went into my advanced language options and tried to do it through there, but got the same error message. "English is not available as a display language in this version of Windows". I have no idea why, since everybody seems to be able to install it just fine.





Finally, I gave in and tried to install the MUI Language Pack manually. I still ran into the same problem, telling me that "This language cannot be installed". I'm running Windows 10 Home so I figure that I should be able to get this working, but can't figure out what's causing the problem.





Can somebody help me out? I really want to fix this.

Thank you in advance!

 

Hello again,

I just noticed I'm running Windows 10 Home Single Language.

Is there any way I can change the language or will I have to reinstall in English?

 

Hi, can I ask how did you find out that you were running Home Single Language?

 

The only way to get it in English is to reinstall using an English install media, or any other full language version and then install English language pack. A Single Language version cannot be upgraded to multilingual version.

 

Cappucino, if you look at your PC´s information, it'll show you all your specs and what version of Windows you're running.

Kari, do you know where I can get an English install media? Do I have to buy a new version of Windows or will I be able to reinstall without a problem?

 

Check this tutorial: Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums

I am not sure if you can activate a normal full Windows 10 if your license is Single Language.

 

Thanks for all the effort you have put into this topic, Kari. Very much appreciated.
My interest is the Myanmar (Burmese) keyboard and language, but in particular, some of the characters in that set (U1000 to U109F) yet missing from the keyboard.
Can a keyboard be modified? ie. how can I access codepoints 1060 to 1069?
I'm sure there would be a lot of people wanting to use their unique dialect and facing a similar problem
cheers

 

Hi there, Rafael.
I have exactly the same problem, although my Win8.1 was originally in German, and well... my German is veeery poor.
Did you manage to solve this issue?

Any help/tip will be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

I have tried everything but EVERY time I reboot "SWE" pops backup in the system tray. I installed windows 10 from a US english iso and set my input to swedish, which I want. But everything else I want in English. I might be anal but this annoys me as hell. Windows is shown in English and everything is how I want it, except that this annoying language switcher in the system tray comes back every time I reboot despite Swedish being removed. I have tried bringing swedish back and remove it, then SWE disappears. But then I reboot and voila, it's back!

Edit: I found the cause. I used RDP from a Windows 7 PC and for some reasons the language preferences overruled the ones on the remote PC with windows 10.

 

I am having a similar problem here, however I don't use RDP to connect to this computer.

What happens/happened for me:
I installed Windows 10 education from scratch, after having formatted my harddrive with windows 7 on it.
The ISO I downloaded with the media creation tool from the Microsoft website, it seems to be a multilanguage ISO.
I installed using English as display language, but set Dutch as my input language, as I'm from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we use US keyboards, but for convenience reasons I usually set the keyboard to US International.

So to reiterate:
Display: English
Input: Dutch
Keyboard: US International

This has worked fine on Windows 7 before, and because I only had one option for every setting, the Language button on the taskbar was hidden. I couldn't switch anyways.
Now in Windows 10 however, it keeps offering me new settings I didn't ask for all the time. I am not sure if this happens after rebooting though.

First the language switch button showed up because it suddenly offered me both Dutch and English as an input language, both with the US International keyboard. I went to check whether it had installed any new language settings, but when I got to the Language settings, there still was only the one option I did set up myself. I added a secondary option, namely English as input language, with US international keyboard, then moved the new option up in the list, and removed the Dutch input / US Int keyb combination.

For a while this went well. The language selector disappeared from the taskbar. After some time I noticed the button returned though, this time with yet another change: It suddenly offered English twice, but the difference being one with US international, and one with US keyboard. Again I checked the settings in the Language section through the control panel, and again the new option was not visible in the list.

This all happened in the 2 days I'm using Windows 10 on this computer by the way.

My question is where is this coming from? Why does windows 10 not just stick to what I tell it to do? And why are the new options it keeps pushing to me not even visible in the settings? Right now I have to add new languages to be able to remove anything, because only one set is on my list at a time, even though the language selection button on the taskbar would suggest otherwise!


[edit]
It would seem the updates KB3081448 / 449 / 451 that got installed this week fixed my problem (I believe the OOBE improvement one, it said something about language packs.)
[/edit]

 

Question... so I have everything selected as my home being Canada, Format: Canada, Language Canada... everything English (Canada)... its also set as my default display language... however when I check... it says my display language is English (United Kingdoms) is this normal?