Web Courses Academy Blog

How to Change the Default Language in WordPress

Author: Carl Heaton
He is our senior instructor and originally from Manchester UK. Carl teaches our Web Design and Online Marketing Courses.
settings-265131_1920
Quick jump to topics
Sharing is caring

One of the most powerful features of WordPress is its ability to allow users to blog or manage content in their language of choice.

If you have been using WordPress for a while and you would like to change the language for your admin dashboard, here a few easy steps:

Download the Language files

You can get the language files you need from the WordPress in Your Language web page. The file will have a name such as in the following example:

fr_FR.mo

The first two small characters (‘fr’ for French) refer to the the ISO-639 language code. This is followed by the ISO-3166 country code (_FR for France in the example). So, the French .mo file would be called fr_FR.mo.

Copy Language files to your WordPress Installation

Once you have downloaded the correct /mo file to your computer, copy it to your server in the directory ‘wp-content/languages’. You will probably need to create the ‘languages’ directory if you installed WordPress in English.

Modify the wp-config.php file

In the root directory of your WordPress installation is a file named ‘wp-config.php’. This file includes all of the setting to allow you to connect to the database and manage a few other items. Download the file and open it up in your Text Editor application.

Edit the language line

Inside the ‘wp-config.php’ file, you will see the following lines:

define('WPLANG','');

You will need to change this to use the file you just copied to your server. If using the example for French above, you would edit the like to look like the following:

define('WPLANG','fr_FR');

Save the ‘wp-config.php’ file and copy it back to your web server.

Goto User Profile and Change Language

Visit your Admin Dashboard with your web browser. Your blog should now be displayed in the language you desired.

More great articles
There is more where this came from
Join our monthly newsletter packed with course dates, latest articles, free resources and job opportunities

Sorry. You must be logged in to view this form.

Promise to only send you useful interesting newsletters once a month.