How to Change Default Document Language in LibreOffice

This tutorial explains how to change the language in LibreOffice Writer for spell-checking your documents.

Sometimes, you may write a document in a language other than the default English dialect in LibreOffice Writer. In that case, you will also need to change the language settings to ensure that the spelling and grammar checks work for that specific language. Please note that although LibreOffice supports over 200 languages, it only backs a handful of languages when it comes to spelling and grammar checking.

Here is a list of a few supported languages for spell-checking a document in LibreOffice:

Asturian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese (Simplified and Taiwan), English (British, USA, Canada, Australia), French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Latgalian, Latvian, Persian, Spanish, Telugu, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

In short, if you see a green tick mark on the left side of a language in the list, then LibreOffice can spell check for that language.

How to Change Language in LibreOffice Writer

Step 1: Open your document in LibreOffice Writer.

Step 2: From the top menu bar, select Tools > Options

Step 3: Navigate to Language Settings > Languages

Step 4: Under Default Language for Document select your preferred language for the document.

Note: Changing the default language settings by this method effects all documents. If you only want to change the language for the current document individually, you can enable For the current document only checkbox.

Step 5: Once you have selected your preferred language for the document, click on the Apply button to save your changes. Then click OK to exit the window.

Step 6: After changing the document language, you might want to turn on automatic spell-checking in LibreOffice Writer.

To do so, navigate to the top menu bar and click on Tools > Automatic Spell Checking.

Wrapping Up

That’s all there is to it! If you have followed the steps correctly, you would have successfully changed the language in LibreOffice. That’s it! Let me know in the comments if you found this tutorial helpful or if you encountered any issues while following the steps.