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Registered User
Asked: 2012-02-02 22:10:14 +0800 CST

Unwanted Chinese language got set in system settings [duplicate]

  • 772

I have made some changes in system settings, following suggestions by some users. However, this morning when I did a reboot I am unable to see English as my default language. My system is showing some Chinese characters which I do not understand.

All I wanted was to use Libre Office for a particular document in Hindi. What happened is that even Gmail is opening in Chinese. The system settings folder and others are also opening in Chinese. I am unable to use the system now.

I have uploaded the snapshots here: please have a look.

Notice that in the third snapshot the calendar and menu are appearing in Chinese.

I want the original US English menus and folder names back. I just wanted to type a document with Lohit Hindi font in Libre Office.

I use Ubuntu 11.10. I do not use Unity, only Gnome desktop. I installed gnome-session-fallback a long time back and have been using that ever since.

How do I get back to all English submenus and English folder names? I have a US English Keyboard and I use only US English. This thing which is now somehow set is unwanted.

gnome desktop-environments language-support 11.10

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I noticed in files /etc/environment, $HOME/.profile following lines were present:

    export LANGUAGE="zh_CN:en"
export LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
export LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"

    and in /etc/default/locale only US English line was present as you can see this snapshot:

    I went to those files and deleted these extra lines of Chinese Language now I am able to resolve this problem and things are back on track.

    However specially want to mention that gnome-language-selector did not help at all.

    Sharing this for future archives hope this solution will help some one in future.

    • 5

  2. edit your file

    /etc/default/locale

    in there change all settings to

    en_US.UTF-8

    • 1

  3. I had my account mysteriously change to Chinese after an update today - this is 12.04.

    The problem was in .pam_environment: I changed all zh_CN to en_GB and logged back in again.

    I will note that when the pop-up thing says 'Oooh, you've changed your language, do you want to rename all your directories', just perhaps there should be a very obvious option 'Oh no, I didn't mean for that to be magically inflicted upon me by some weird configuration mistake, please keep my language settings as they were!'.

    If there was one, I didn't notice it, so it's probably not obvious enough.

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