Default language for MS Word document

If you use MS Word to type in more than one language, you have probably been frustrated occasionally.

My latest frustration was the default language of a document - not default language for all new documents, but for one document. I have found no clean solution for this, at least using MacOS or iOS.

However, for people who like to live dangerously, one can use a text editor - in this example BBEdit:

1. Open the Word document in BBEdit. (One can drag the document onto the BBEdit icon, or use the File > Open menu in BBEdit.)
2. Expand the "folders" in the Word document.
3. Go through at least settings.xml and styles.xml in the "word" folder.
4. In each file, search for at least the tags rPrChange and docDefaults. If they have a lang value that is different from what you want, change it.
5. Save.
6. Make frequent backups.
7. Don't blame me, if anything goes wrong.

An example of a tag with French:

w:lang w:val="fr-FR"

If you are not happy with French, you can change fr-FR to another ISO Code, like en-GB, en-US or de-DE.

This can be handy, if you get the wrong spell checker when creating new comments or paragraphs. I have also had problems with a document that changed the spelling of an entire document, as soon as I opened it on an iPad or iPhone. It did not matter that I had changed all document styles to the language of my choice, Word for iOS changed it to the default language for the document. I suspect some corruption when converting to or from Pages, but I do not know exactly when the problem appeared.

In case you just want to change the default language for all new documents, that is much easier, just  open a document and go to > Tools > Languages > Default.

This blogpost was written for MS Word version 16.25 for MacOS.