Comments on: How to set the default language in Mac OSX or Pages to be Australian or British English

By: david

david — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:44:34 +0000

Thank you no more of that american rubbish

By: Hayo Baan

Hayo Baan — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:31:12 +0000

This has puzzled me for long: even setting the language order with British first, I got US spelling. Until this post I hadn’t bothered to investigate further, but on Lion, and I think (Snow) Leopard too, you need to change the order of the language in two locations in the “Language & Text” preferences:
1) At the “Language” tab. This one is straightforward
2) At the text tab. This one is almost hidden: Click on the selector box called “Spelling” (mine reads “Automatic by Language”), in the list of choices that pops up, at the bottom you’ll find “Set Up…” choose that and set the order of the languages there.
Note: You can also choose to always use e.g. “British English” of course, but that is not as useful al “Automatic by Language” in my opinion.

Cheers,
Hayo

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 06:12:58 +0000

Brilliant and thanks for the great help.

By: Alan Richardson

Alan Richardson — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 01:12:55 +0000

Many thanks. This is the elegant solution – working within the system. I was quite frustrated by the way Pages would keep flipping back to English when I had set it to British English. I hadn’t thought of it as relating to a system setting.

Regards, Alan

By: karan

karan — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:04:28 +0000

@Paul that’s right, and the icon is now labelled “Language and Text” instead of “International”. Thanks for the update!

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:10:27 +0000

In OS X 10.6.3 (as of this post). There is a new Tab in-between Languages and Formats called TEXT. Click on TEXT and you can force the Australian English dictionary to be used in all spell checking and defaults on programs running in OS X.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:03:01 +0000

Indeed, far too difficult to find! Thanks very much for the tip.