Writing With Multiple Languages In Pages and Other Apps

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using multiple languages while composing a document in Pages.

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Most of the time when you're writing a document in an app like Pages you're writing in the language that is also set for the main language for your Mac. But some people work in multiple languages. You can only have one primary language for the interface for your Mac. But you can actually write in multiple languages in an app like Pages. For instance take a look right here. I've got three sentences. Each in a different language. Now notice how it's not pointing out any spelling mistakes. I do have Spellcheck on so if I were add a mistake like that you could see it underlines it. But how does it know that all the words here aren't spelling mistakes as well? How can I control which language that Pages is using? 

So first let's note that this is by paragraph. So if I were to combine these two paragraphs here you could see it does indicate a number of spelling mistakes. Instead of thinking that this is in Spanish it actually sees these as misspelled words. If I were to put that on a separate line then eventually it would catch up and take away the spelling errors. So when trying to figure out which language you're currently using and which language will work with Spellcheck there are a number of different places to look. 

Let's start off first in System Preferences. In System Preferences, under Language & Region, this is where you can set your Mac's main language. So you can add it right here. I have my preferred language set to US English. Note that I can add other languages here. So instead of just having one I can have actually have multiple ones. But the top one will always be the one that the User Interface is drawn in. It's where all the menu items and buttons and everything decides what language they're going to use. Now in addition to this you could also go to Apps here. You can set a different language for different apps. So let's go in here and add the Pages app and I'm going to change the default language here to French. Now when I do this it's going to notice that Pages is running currently. So I'm going to relaunch it. You can see now that the menu items here are actually in French. So are the buttons. But if I were to look in another app, like say in System Preferences, you could see this is in English. It's only French when I go into this App. 

This could already be useful for some people. Say you use both English and French but you prefer to have Pages set to be French so when you're writing in French everything kind of makes more sense to you. Then you could do that. You could go back here in System Preferences and you can change this and you can move this setting right here and you can see it's going to relaunch Pages again. Now you can see the interface is back into English. 

Now in Pages here there are a few places where you can also select the language. If you go to File, then Advanced, you could go to Language & Region and change the language for this document. So let's change this language to French right here. What this is going to do is it's going to change some standard things. Like how date and times are shown. You could also set a region. So all the different places where French is spoken and there's a variation you can change it to be that. But this is still not going to change how Spellcheck works. You can see this message down here. This is much more about formatting and not really about the words and the language you're using. So where is it figuring out that these words are spelled correctly?

Well, if you go into Edit and then Spelling & Grammar choose show Spelling & Grammar. This brings up this little window here that allows you to go in Spellcheck manually. Go through each thing. It's kind of the advanced Spellcheck interface. At the bottom here you're going to see these language selections. The first one is Automatic By Language. So what's happening here is it's figuring out which language each paragraph is using. It's doing a Spellcheck based on that. That's why when we combined the first two sentences into one paragraph it found a bunch of spelling errors. It guessed that the language should be English based on the first sentence and then it didn't know what these words were in the second sentence. So setting this to Automatic By Language is a great way to allow you to type in multiple languages on your Mac in Pages and not have to worry about Spellcheck being wrong. 

On the other hand you could choose a specific language and then when you do Spellcheck will then go to that language. Now it's not going to do it right away. You have to kind of prompt it by typing something. So you can see by typing something in that paragraph or this paragraph it figures out there's something wrong. So you can only choose here one language or Automatic By Language in Pages. 

So what about a situation like this. The first sentence I'm writing in US English and the second sentence is in UK English. You can see it identifies the word color is spelled wrong. As a matter of fact if I were to type it it would Autocorrect it. You could see. So how do we get it to work in both of these. Why isn't the automatic setting working with US English and UK English? Well the answer lies in System Preferences again. You're going to go to Keyboard and then you're going to go to Text. Here you've got the settings for spellchecking on the right. Here it's set to Automatic By Language and you can choose a specific language. So this is kind of the system level version of what we just saw in Pages. But there is something all the way at the bottom here. Setup. If I choose Setup then I get to choose exactly which languages are being used by that automatic setting. So you can see here that French and Spanish are both included in this. But under English only US English is included. Let's modify that by saying we want British English included as well. Now I can click Done and then if I go back here and let's retype this word. You could see now it doesn't autocorrect it and it doesn't underline it as spelled wrong because the Automatic setting is saying that that is fine because it has detected that the second line is written in British English not in American English. 

So those are all the places that you need to look if you're using more than one language on your Mac and you really want to customize how it works with Spellcheck while you're writing.

Here we in TextEdit and you could see here in TextEdit in Spelling & Grammar you've got some of the same things here. The Spelling & Grammar panel is the same. So you could choose Automatic or any other one of these. If you use Automatic it's going to obey the System setting. Even in the Mail App here you have the same thing. But the third party apps, of course, can do whatever they want and something like Microsoft Word is going to have all sorts of its own custom settings for this. 

So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.