Find Default System Language in Windows 10

As you may already know from previous articles, Windows 10 supports changing the display language using language packs. If you are working in a localized user account in Windows 10 which is your native language, you might want to find out what the default system language of the operating system is. There are several methods to find this information.

The default language of the user interface (system language) is the language used during the installation of Windows 10. When installing and right after installing, Windows 10 uses this language to show messages, buttons and menus. The user can change this language to another one by installing a language pack if the current edition of Windows 10 supports MUI. Tip: See how to find the edition of Windows 10.

You can find information about the default system language using one of the methods described below.

To find the default system language in Windows 10, do the following.

Method one. Using DISM

To see what the default system language in Windows 10 is, open an elevated command prompt and type or copy-paste the following command:

dism /online /get-intl

In the output, you'll find the default system language and all installed languages.

Method two. Using PowerShell

Open a new PowerShell instance and type or copy-paste the following command:

[CultureInfo]::InstalledUICulture

In the output, see the columns "Name" and "DisplayName".

Method three. Using Registry

The same information can be found in the Registry. Here is how it can be done.

  1. Open Registry Editor (see how).
  2. Navigate to the following Registry key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Language

    Tip: How to jump to the desired registry key with one click.

  3. On the right, see the value data of the string value InstallLanguage. Its value is the code of the language used during the setup of Windows 10. You can decode it using the chart provided on the MSDN web site. According to the chart, the value data of 0409 is English (United States).

That's it.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

2 thoughts on “Find Default System Language in Windows 10”

  1. Hello, information above was very useful to me recently, thank you!

    Now I have an issue where OS cannot be In-Place upgraded although WIM language is the same as result of [CultureInfo]::InstalledUICulture. (de-DE = de-DE)

    Output of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Language shows us:
    InstallLanguage 0407 de-DE
    Default 0407 de-DE
    InstallLanguageFallback de-de NULL
    (default) 0407 de-DE
    PreviousInstallLanguage 0409 en-US

    PreviousInstallLanguage property seems to be strange and can’t find much about its purpose.
    Also, this is not an isolated case.

    Any ideas welcome!

  2. [CultureInfo]::InstalledUICulture the only one who really 100% shows the Computer Language

    THX !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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