Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at Language, Region,
and Input Source Settings in macOS Ventura.
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So sometimes you need to deal with different languages, regions, and also keyboards on your
Mac. For instance you may move between countries or work on documents that come from around the
world. You may have a keyboard that may be specific to a region but you want to switch
it to a different region. Let's take a look at all those settings and how they work in macOS Ventura.
So let's start by going to System Settings and then General.
One of the options here is Language & Region. So this is where you would go to Add languages
to your Mac. Languages are used by the Operating System and various apps for things like the Menu
items, Buttons, all sorts of text everywhere. You could easily use the Plus button here and
select another language from the list. Every time you add a new language it asks you if you want to
make that the Default language or stick with the current default. You could also change the order
of these languages. So you can select one and drag it up. If you drag one up to the top it
will change the default language on your Mac. When you change the default language you need to log
out and log back in or Restart for that change to take effect. Then you would see all of the
interface elements on your Mac and probably in all the apps you use as well change to that language.
Now when you have multiple languages here you also have the option to apply this to
the Login Window. Since the Login Window is outside of any User Account it's possible
to have several user accounts using different languages. So this allows
you to say you want the selected language to be the language used by the Login Screen.
Now the order of languages here is important. If an app you're using doesn't have the preferred
language then we use the first one in the list that it has that language for. So,
for instance, if your primary language here was French but the app you're using only has
interface elements for English and Spanish then it would take English and Spanish,
whichever is next. The same will go for a lot of webpages as well.
Now in addition to these settings you also can set a Region.
A Region is really important because it allows you to make various decisions about how you want
things to appear. You'll see these take immediate effect when you make changes. For instance,
let me bring cup Calendar here. If I switch the first day of the week to Monday you could see
it instantly changes the calendar app because the Calendar App listens to this setting when deciding
how to display things. With the Weather App here I've got the temperature in Fahrenheit but if
I were to switch to Celsius then the Weather App instantly updates. In the Finder here if
you narrow the column down then you'll see dates represented with slashes between the numbers. So
I can change the date format, like that, and now you can see it uses that in the Finder instead.
Now a couple of times I've already gotten the question, How can you switch the comma
and period use in Numbers? For instance, in the United State here if you have a number
like one thousand and in the cell formatting in Numbers if you set a 1,000 separator you get a
comma. If I add some decimal places there you can see it uses a period for that. Now you'd think
the setting swapping comma and period would be here in this list. It actually is but it depends
on what region you're using. So the United States region isn't marked by Apple as having
more than one option. But if I were to switch to another region, like let's switch to France here,
you could see now there's Number Format and with France as my Region I can choose
a space as a thousand separator and a comma as the decimal point. Or,
commas as a thousand separator and a period as the decimal point. If I switch this to Germany
then I get periods as a thousand separator as one option. So I can switch to that. Notice here if I
go back to Numbers it switches automatically. Notice also you get different date formats
depending upon the Region. So here are the three different formats for Germany. The first
two show the day first and then the month. But if I switch back to the United States
you could see my date formats are only month and then day, or year, month, day with dashes.
Now you have another option here at the bottom. It's for individual applications to have different
languages. So I can select an Application if I played the Weather App and I could change that
to use another language, to Danish for instance, and add that as a different app. Now when I run
Weather you'll notice that the Menu items and everything are in Danish. Whereas if I
go to another app, like say back into Numbers, everything here is in English. If we want to
remove the customization for a single app you can select it and then hit the Minus button.
There are a bunch of other places where you can specify a language. So at the bottom here you've
got Translation Languages and you could actually download more translation languages to use. Also
there's an On Device mode where it will always do the translation on your device. It won't send
it in to Apple for a quick translation there. In Siri and Spotlight you could also set the language
for Siri. Once you choose a language you can choose a voice as well. Also down under Keyboard
if you look at Dictation you can choose a dictation language you can add from a
variety of languages that Apple has available as being compatible with dictation. So if
you're dictating text make sure this is set to the right language for you.
Now you can also set language for Spellcheck. So if you go into an app, like Pages here,
if you look under Edit and then Spelling & Grammar select Show Spelling & Grammar which
is simply the Command, Shift, Semicolon key on US keyboards and then you'll see
the Spellchecker appear. This is where you have the setting for Language. You can leave
it at Automatic by Language. Which is what I have it here. That's why there's no spelling
mistakes found here even though one line is in English and one line is in French.
It will definitely find spelling mistakes if I were to add a character here, for instance,
it knows that it is spelled wrong. If I were to switch from Automatic by Language
to French you could see it sees a bunch of spelling mistakes in the English line now.
If I switch to US English it's going to see a bunch of mistakes in the French line now. Only
with Automatic by Language does it pickup that amusing one language here and one language there.
You also have an Accessibility here under Voice Control the ability to set a language for Voice
Control. You can add a language here like that. Then it appears in the list. Now another place you
deal with language related settings is in Keyboard Settings. Go down to Keyboard Settings here, there
is a section called Input Sources. So this deals with the specific type of keyboard you've got. If
you bought your Mac in the United States you have a US keyboard. But if you bought it in another
country you may have a keyboard specific to that country instead. You can Edit the input sources
here and you can see a list of them. I've added a few here. If you select one of these you could
see the keyboard layout for that particular type of keyboard. So, for instance, I can see Q and
W are the top left letters. If I go to Canadian and British it is the same. But I switch to this
keyboard here its got A and Z instead of Q and W there. If I leave it at that then when I actually
type with those keys, even though it says Q and W on my US keyboard I'm going to get A and Z.
Now if you go to All Input Sources here you're going to get all these options. One of them is
Show Input Menu in the Menu Bar. I've got that turned On and you could see it right here. I can
switch between the four keyboards I've chosen very easily now. A really neat thing you can do here is
select Automatically Switch to a Document's Input Source. So I'm going to turn that On. So you can
see I'm in this document here. If I change this document to use this particular type of keyboard,
you can see it indicates it there. Now I'm going to create a new document. In the second document
I'm going to switch to a US keyboard. Now when I switch between these two documents notice how
it automatically switches to the keyboard for each one. That's all because of this switch right here.
Now you also have a language selection here for Spelling that looks a lot like
what we saw in Pages before. That's because this is the default here. So Automatic By
Language is the Default. If I change it to US English, notice if I switch back to Pages here
it now says US English here in Spelling & Grammar. So any app that actually has the
default Spelling & Grammar control will obey the default method from this System Settings.
Another setting that you've got under Keyboard you should probably know about is,
if you go to Keyboard Shortcuts, there's a section here for Input Sources. You see a
Control Space selects the previous Input Source and Control Option Space is the
next one. So it is the same as switching here. It is just something you can do with
your hands on the keyboard. So Control Space brings up this list here and I can continue
to look through the list. When I get to the one I want I just release Control.
So that's a look at all the different settings for Language, Region, and
Input Sources in macOS Ventura. Ihope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.