iOS: How to Get the Device Current Language Setting?

Ohad Regev picture Ohad Regev · Jul 26, 2011 · Viewed 35.9k times · Source

There are some features within my application that are supposed to be based on the language settings of the device where it's running.

I want to get the actual language and not some country settings. Foe example, if the language is English, I don't care if it's US, UK, Australia, etc...

I'm familiar with the NSLocale object, but it seems to relate to the Region Format setting and not to the Language setting (see screen shot below) so when I try to retrieve the language out of it using [locale displayNameForKey:NSLocaleIdentifier value:[locale localeIdentifier] I get things like English (United States) instead of English; also, I think that what I need is the Language data and not the Region Format (am I right?).

Can anyone direct me to how to retrieve the language setting?

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Answer

Vladimir picture Vladimir · Jul 26, 2011

User preferred languages are stored can be retrieved from locale as array and current language identifier is the first object in that array:

NSString *currentLanguage = [[NSLocale preferredLanguages] objectAtIndex:0];

If you want language in more readable form then use displayNameForKey:value: method of NSLocale:

NSString *langID = [[NSLocale preferredLanguages] objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *lang = [[NSLocale currentLocale] displayNameForKey:NSLocaleLanguageCode value:langID];