Language settings

User profile settings

A user can set their preferred language for the site in Administration > My profile settings > Edit profile.

Course administration settings

A teacher can force the language of their course in Administration > Course administration > Edit settings. New feature
in Moodle 2.7!

The capability moodle/site:forcelanguage may be allowed by the admin for users who need to override this language (for example, when testing problems in a course in a language they do not know.)

Site administration settings

There are a number of language settings for administrators in Administration > Site administration > Language > Language settings.

Language autodetect

By default, Moodle detects a user's language from their browser setting. However, language auto-detection may be disabled so that the default site language is used instead.

Default language

This sets the default language for the site. This setting can be overridden by users using the language menu or the setting in their user profile.

Note: If a preferred language is set in your browser then this will override the default site language (unless language auto-detection is disabled).

You can enable localised error messages for database connection problems by add the following line to your config.php file:

$CFG->lang="yourlangcode";

Display language menu

This sets whether the language menu is displayed on the login page and the home page. If this is turned off, the only places where a user can change the language setting is in their user profile or in the course settings if they are a teacher.

Languages on the language menu

If you want to limit the number of languages students and teachers can select from, enter a reduced list here.

If your site uses a child language that relies in a parent language, you can edit 'Languages on language menu' in Site Administration > Language > Language settings, and remove the parent language; eg, if you are in Canada and you want your users to use Canadian French but not the original French language.

Language selection priority

This figure shows Moodle priority when selecting languages:

Sitewide locale

It's generally best to leave this setting empty, as it's set through each language pack.

Excel encoding

Leave as default (Unicode) unless you have a particular reason for wanting Latin encoding.

Documentation