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This guide walks you through how to change different language settings across you SharePoint online.

There are many settings in SharePoint that affect what language of SharePoint site is going to be viewed in.  

Some affect just the language of the user interface, and some affect the language of the content.

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For these settings to have any effect the site itself must support that language.

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Site settings

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There are two scenarios, site settings with multilingual page publishing, and without.

Under site settings select “language settings”.  

There are two ways to select languages.  

   1. The more general way which works in all scenarios is under Advanced settings.

    2. The other way works only if you turn on the multilingual page publishing feature with the slider that says enable translation into multiple languages.

Both of the above let you add or remove languages from the site.

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User settings

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Site content language

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If you have multilingual page publishing enabled:

There will be a little language dropdown at the top right of the page, which sets your content language preference, temporarily, for this page.  It navigates to a different language version of the page, but it does not affect the user interface.  It's a site-specific session cookie called siteLangPref, which can override your personal settings and show a different page.

More long-term and tenant-wide language preference comes from your profile settings and your account settings.

Profile settings affect SharePoint and a few SharePoint-like components, while Account settings affect even more M365components.  These affect both the content and the UI language

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Profile language preferences

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We walk you through how to change your language in your SharePoint profile here.

    - Click on “My Microsoft 365 profile” (or similar text)

    - Update Profile

    - Expand “How do I change language regional settings?”

    - Click on the “here” button, then the three dots, then “language and region”

    - Select the display language and press Save.  

This takes about 15 minutes to take effect on all site, maybe more.

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Account language preference

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To change your language in the account:

    - Click on “My Microsoft 365 profile” or go to myaccount.microsoft.com.

    - Go to “Settings and privacy” and expand “Display language”

    - “Change display language”.  

    - For both Account and Profile language preferences, it offers a large list of languages and language versions that SharePoint doesn’t support, so choose one of the ones that are selected in the Site content language, or it may have no effect.

When you update your display language in your Account settings, it’s going to your language preferences in your Profile settings, which can take about 15 minutes, and once updated that preference will propagate to the sites in another 15 minutes or more.  

Some things seem to take longer than 15-30minutes, but that is because SharePoint’s caching mechanism is not aware of changes to your language preference, so it shows you UI elements in the language that was selected at the time that it cached the UI element.

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Browser language

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If you have no language at all selected in your profile, then SharePoint will use your browser language to determine the content and UI language.  However you will have a language selected in your profile, so that will always override your browser.

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PointFire 365

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PointFire 365 has its own language toggle. It's very quick, a couple of seconds, and it synchronizes user interface and content language, and it updates SharePoint’s display caches.

You can watch a video demo here

If you have more questions, feel free to live chat with us or email us at sales@icefire.ca.

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Download the PointFire free trial here

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