Choosing the Language

Controller > choose language

You will probably only need to do this once, when you first use Oxford WordSmith Tools.

Choose the language for the text you're analysing in the Controller under Adjust Settings | Text & Languages. The language and character set must be compatible, e.g. English is compatible with Windows Western (1252), DOS Multilingual (850).

Oxford WordSmith Tools handles a good range of languages, ranging from Albanian to Ukrainian. Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc. are handled in Unicode. You can view wordlists, concordances, etc. in different languages at the same time.

The point of it…

Languages vary considerably in their preferences regarding sorting order. Spanish, for example, uses this order: A,B,C,CH,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,LL,M,N,Ñ,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. And accented characters are by default treated as equivalent to their unaccented counterparts in some languages (so, in French we get donne, donné, données, donner, donnez, etc.) but in other languages accented characters are not considered to be related to the unaccented form in this way (in Czech we get cesta .. cas .. hre .. chodník ..)

Sorting is handled using Microsoft routines. If you process texts in a language which Microsoft haven't got right, you should still see wordlists in a consistent order.

Note that case-sensitive means that Mother will come after mother (not before apple or after zebra).

It is important to understand that a comparison of two wordlists (e.g. in KeyWords) relies on sort order to get satisfactory results -- you will get strange results in this if you are comparing 2 wordlists which have been declared to be in different languages.

How Languages are chosen

Run the Languages Chooser Utility in the main Controller Tools menu.

See also: Choosing Accents & Symbols, Accented characters, Processing text in Chinese etc.