The Mac's linguistic tricks
Today we continue our march through the row of personal system preferences with a long look at the Language & Text preference. As its name implies, within it you’ll find several settings for configuring the language your Mac and Mac’s keyboard use, spelling options, text substitutions, and formatting based on geographical region. These features are available via four tabs. Let’s make our way forward.
Language
Comfortable as the Mac appears to be with the language you natively speak, it’s actually a citizen of the world in regard to language support. It supports dozens of languages as well as a smattering of variations among specific languages (British, Australian, Canadian, and United States English, for example). You find these languages in this first tab.
Here you have the option to sort languages in the order you prefer. In the United States, you’ll find English as the first entry. If you’d prefer that your Mac use a different primary language, simply drag its name to the top of the language list. When you change languages, the Finder will use the new language after you log out and then log back into your account. If an application is capable of using the new language, it will do so the next time you launch it. So, in this case, you needn’t log out.
Choose your primary language in the Language tab
If an application doesn’t support the first language you’ve chosen, it will try the next language in the list. If that one doesn’t work, on to the next language until a compatible language is found. This is helpful for those who read and write more than one language and one of those languages is less commonly used.
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