#HOW TO CHANGE LANGUAGE IN WINDOWS 8 PLUS#

Dutch text prediction supports both Belgium and the Netherlands. French supports text prediction for French as it is written in France, in Switzerland, and in Canada.

#HOW TO CHANGE LANGUAGE IN WINDOWS 8 PLUS#

Windows Phone 8 offers on-screen keyboards for each of the 50 supported display languages, plus a bit more. (Jason Grieves recently wrote a nice post explaining some of these changes.) Not every language supports every feature, but 40 of the languages have some form of advanced support. Text prediction has been thoroughly revamped for Windows Phone 8, with features such as word prediction, auto-correction, and auto-accent. For example, a colleague here follows his favorite cricket team on a Tamil language site on his phone, even though it’s not among the 50 supported display languages in Windows Phone 8. But as you can see, you’ll still be able to read nearly any website or email in your language. I’ve drawn a red circle around the two reading languages listed here we don’t support because we lack fonts: Lontara and Myanmar (also known as Burmese). More subtly, the arrow icons still point to the right since users associate this direction with “play” as opposed to “reverse”. Note that text is now aligned on the right side of the screen, and the flow is towards the left as is natural for a language such as Arabic, although “Facebook” is still written left-to-right. Below is a screenshot from the Arabic interface.

Adapting our design philosophy required us to look carefully at every screen in Window Phone and judiciously choose which elements to mirror. For example, mirroring the phone dialing pad or a map would be a very bad idea. If everything was mirrored, the design wouldn’t be too complicated, but in reality only certain things are. So we adopted an approach for these languages that we share with Windows 8: we call it “mirroring” because it reverses the appearance of the screen for these languages. Without mirroring, this would cause the beginning of right-to-left words to flow off screen-not very readable.

For example, in Windows Phone, the end of a word often flows onto the next screen. However, early investigations showed this didn’t really work for Windows Phone, mostly because text is such an integral part of our design. This is similar to what some of our competitors have done. Initially we considered localizing Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian as we do other languages: the text would flow right-to-left, but the screen orientation wouldn’t change. (And you’ll note we managed to get it and a few other top vote-getters added. Maybe it’s because I’m left-handed, but I’ve always had a special fondness for these languages and was amazed (but delighted) that we had so many requests for Persian in our Suggestion Box forum. Perhaps most challenging are the languages that are written right-to-left, specifically Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian.

How to change language in windows 8