I regularly work with documents that contain text in more than one language. I sometimes need to find the place where the language specified for text changes. Spell-check suddenly starts signalling misspelled words, and it turns out that somwhere in there, the specified language has changed from British English to US English, or some similar switch, and the dictionary for that language does not contain some technical term I have previously added to the language I *-thought-* was in use for that entire section of the document. I can track it down, slowly and painfully, by constantly moving the cursor and selecting the language dialog from the ribbon, but that is an incredible PIA to do regularly. Is there a way to locate the place in the text where the language specification changes?

Make sure that you have the language displayed in your status bar. That will reflect the language at the insertion point or selection.

Good trick, thanks. It does show the status, although it's a bit slow to update, so skipping around takes some hunt and peck, or a bit of patience to locate the exact boundary. But your answer also got me to thinking about the problem a little more clearly, and I realized that the Format option in the search dialog box allows searching for a specific language. That lets me find the place where a specific language starts. It's not quite as pretty as having, for instance, brackets displayed for bookmark locations, but the combination of that and the status bar allow me to do what I need. Thank you for the steer.

The thing is, the way Word works, a language does not necessarily start at a particular point in a document. It can be set by character and definitely by word.


See:

• Proofing Language Keeps Changing - Solutions - How can I keep my proofing language from changing?
• Using Styles for Proofing Language Settings - Microsoft Community

I don't understand what you mean by that. I've seen those links - in fact, I had found them on my own and read them before I posted my question. But what do you mean by saying that it doesn't start at a specific point? Where else could it start than at a specific point? The cursor is on one letter, showing a particular language, then I move one character and the displayed language is something else.

Where else could it be than at that particular point - the boundary between those two characters? Sorry if I'm being dense, but I just don't get what you mean.

What I am saying, imperfectly, is that it can start and stop at many points, not just one. I think you've got it.

Oh, I see. Yes, this is one of the things I deal with, a lot. There can be dozens of places in the doc where the language changes, and among several different languages. Occasionally I have to give up and just change the entire doc to a single language, then wade my way through the resulting sea of spell-check flags. And changing languages is a multi-click PIA. It works, but it's not one of Word's stronger features.

Again, you can apply language settings using character styles. These can have keyboard shortcuts attached.