Summary

Microsoft Word lets you change the language you’re using, and you can change your keyboard language to match the language you’re typing in. Frustratingly, the language option will sometimes revert to the default language. The most effective way to remedy this is to use Microsoft Word’s styles.

It is useful in a variety of situations, like providing a vocab list for your students, writing a novel in English with a foreign language character, or providing annotations or captions in a second language.

Word document showing where to click to modify the Normal style.

Step 1: Define Your Normal Style

The first step is todefine your Normal style—the formatting that the text for each language will use before applying the language. To do this, in the “Home” tab on the ribbon, right-click “Normal” in the Styles group, and choose “Modify.”

In our example, we’ll use Times New Roman, 12 pt font, justified alignment, single-space line spacing, and a 12 pt space after each paragraph.

Word document containing a string of text in Spanish using the Normal style. The sentence is highlighted as containing errors.

If you also intend to have titles within your document,modify the Heading styles, too.

Step 2: Define Your First Language Style

Now you have defined the formatting for your document, you’re ready to set up your first language style. We want to use Spanish and French in our document, so we’ll start off by telling Word to recognize Spanish.

Importantly, each time you set up a new language style, you muststart with the Normal styleand then modify that style. This is so that your document is consistently formatted, no matter which language you choose to use.

‘Apply Styles’ dialog box in Word, with the style name changed to ‘Spanish’, and the ‘New’ and ‘Modify’ buttons highlighted.

Using the Normal style you have already defined, type the first few words in the first language. Because we haven’t yet told Word to recognize this as Spanish rather than English, it will highlight our text with errors.

Place your cursor anywhere in the sentence and press Ctrl+Shift+S to open the Apply Styles dialog box. In the “Style Name” option, type the name of the language you’re typing in, and click “New.” Then, click “Modify” (this option will become available after you have clicked “New”).

‘Modify Style’ dialog box open, with ‘Format’ and ‘Language’ highlighted.

You will see that the new language style now appears in the Styles group at the top of your window.

In the Modify Style dialog box that has now opened, click “Format” and select “Language.”

‘Language’ dialog box open with ‘Spanish’ selected, ‘Do Not Check Spelling Or Grammar’ unchecked, and ‘OK’ highlighted.

Now, choose your language, uncheck “Do Not Check Spelling Or Grammar”, and click “OK.”

If you may’t find the language you’re looking for, you canadd a new language to your Office suite.

Word document containing a Spanish sentence with an error in ‘espanol’ and Word’s suggestion for correction.

Word now recognizes this string of text as Spanish, meaning the sentence is no longer seen as containing lots of errors. In our example, the word “espanol” needs the letter “ñ”—we can eitherinsert the accented letter manuallyor use Word’s spellcheck suggestions to correct it.

Any time you want to type in this language in your Word document, simply select the corresponding style and Word will do the rest for you.

Word document containing a string of text in French using the Normal style. The sentence is highlighted as containing errors.

Step 3: Define Your Other Language Styles

You can now define your other language styles. Press Enter to go to the next line in your document. Once you have clicked “Normal,” go ahead and type a few words in your second language.

You’re now ready to create a new style for the second language just like we demonstrated previously.

Word document showing where to access ‘View’ on the ribbon and ‘Draft’ in the Views group.

This process can be repeated for as many different languages as you wish.

If you’re going to use these languages in many different documents in the future, you cansave your work as a template, meaning you won’t have to recreate the language styles each time. You can alsocopy the newly created styles to a new Word document.

Word document in draft view and the Style Pane Area, which displays the different styles used in the document, highlighted.

Step 4: Use Your Language Styles

Tosee the different styles you’ve used in your Word document, open the “View” tab on the ribbon and click “Draft.”

This will display the draft view, where you’ll see the Style Pane Area on the left, showing where you have used the different styles.

Word document containing a table with Spanish in the left column and French in the right column. The Spanish column is highlighted and the ‘Spanish’ language style is selected.

You can easily change the style of an existing paragraph by clicking anywhere within the text of the paragraph and changing the style in the Styles group of the Home tab.

If you’re producing a vocab list with translations, create a table, highlight the cells, columns, or rows that will contain a specific language, and then select the correct language in the Styles group.

If you want to use two languages on the same line of a regular paragraph, you’ll need touse a style separatorto tell Word that you’ve got two styles in the same section.

Finally, remember to define your Heading styles using the same steps if you also intend to have more than one heading language in your document.

When you have finished typing your document with the various language styles, you cansave it as a PDFto secure its formatting and layout.