Here’s how Office Watch reader, Erik and we drilled down into Windows and Word to narrow down the source of the Word language bug.
Erik’s tests are with Office 365 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2 but the same behavior has been reported by others in many versions of Word and Windows. Office Watch had a similar test machine using the public (non-beta) releases of Windows and Microsoft Office 365 current channel (public release).
Windows vs Office language settings
If your Windows and Office are both set to the same language, it doesn’t seem that this problem will occur. It’s only in ‘multi-lingual’ setups.
It appears to happen only when the Windows default language (specifically the keyboard layout) is different from the default / preferred proofing language in Word/Office.
Some part of Office assumes the default proofing language is the same as the Windows keyboard language.
Word ‘preferred’ language
At File | Options | Language you can setup Word’s preferred proofing language and dialect. Changing this setting should and does change the language setting in the blank document (Normal.dotm) template.
As you can see, Erik’s preferred proofing language is Dutch so that’s what a new document should use from the start. That’s confirmed in various places like Reveal Formatting (see above), the default Normal style and the Normal.dotm template (see below).
What’s in the Registry
As an extra check, we looked in the Registry and, rightly, the preferred language is ‘nl-nl’, meaning Dutch.
Inside Normal.dotm
Checking inside Normal.dotm shows nothing unusual. The proofing language is definitely set to Dutch (nl-nl)
There’s a mention of US English as the default for East Asian languages however that appears to be the usual setting and so it’s probably not relevant. BTW ‘w:bidi=”ar-SA’ is for ‘right to left’ languages and defaults to Arabic / Saudi Arabia.
Detect Language Automatically
‘Detect Language Automatically” setting is OFF so that should not be a factor.
In any event, ‘Detect Language Automatically’ doesn’t work well and is best avoided.
Word changes language
Despite Word and Office being set to a specific language (see all the above checks), Word changes to another language for a new document. In this case English (US) instead of Dutch.
What’s set in Windows
After a lot of testing various combinations of Windows and Office settings, we found a source of the bug, in some cases.
The Windows Language keyboard layout setting can trigger the bug. For example when Windows is setup for English(US) keyboard layout but Office is set to another language default.
It appears that Word is obeying the Windows keyboard setting instead of what the customer selected in Word.
Win 11: Settings | Time & Language | Language & Region | select the language then Language Options | Keyboard.
Win 10: Settings | Time & Language | Language | Preferred Languages | select the language then Options | Keyboards.
This was happening on the Office Watch test machine but the Windows setting did not make any difference to the problem on Erik’s machine. Clearly there’s further complications involved in this bug.
It’s up to Microsoft to fix this.
Inside the Language choice bug in Word
Three ways to switch language in Word and one way to turn it off
