Forum Discussion
How do I remove "English (United Kingdom)"?
I'm very sorry SamirGunic but I have no more ideas.
Such setting must be hidden somewhere but not in the usual places.
Clean install or live with this annoyance.
Oh no... not the registry... I'm allergic to everything related to Windows registry. As soon as I see mentions of RegEdit and these long registry key names including "CurrentControlSet", I know trouble is awaiting around the corner! LOL 😂
A corrupted Windows registry is in fact the reason I had to reinstall Windows 10 on this PC. I had not reinstalled Windows on this PC since 2018, and so I finally did it a few days ago. I had not reinstalled Windows for little over 3 years, something of a personal record for me. I posted about this issue earlier. Basically, what happened was Windows Update installed KB5001391 which sent my PC on a BSOD/GSOD roller-coaster, causing sudden power loss, corrupted and auto-"repaired" Windows registry, resulting in a state of "No Audio Output device is installed" which I could not recover from despite my best efforts. I did recover form it using System Restore points two or three times, but Windows Update kept installing KB5001391 repeatedly like a vicious idiot, and kept breaking my Windows installation repeatedly and on purpose, up to the point where I could no longer recover and I lost the good restore point along the way. Thankfully, Microsoft stopped pushing out KB5001391 after people started complaining, myself included, but it was already too late for me. The registry was corrupted beyond repair, so I had to reinstall Windows altogether to get the audio problem sorted out.
I am probably not alone to feel this way about the Windows registry. It's one of the absolutely worst parts of Windows that no one talks about or pays any attention to, or seeks improvement or replacement of in the Feedback Hub app (or any other open forum). A very large portion of Windows issues over the past 20 years has been caused by the Windows registry alone. If you run into a registry issue, you're almost guaranteed to need to reinstall Windows to sort it out, unless you have system image backup. That's why Microsoft has built in so many different recovery mechanisms over the years for rebuilding and repairing registry issues, including System Restore and RegBack (which is officially disabled and deprecated as of Windows 10 version 1803).
In any case, I will have a look at your suggestion Spigolo. I am not able to test it at the moment, but I will test it and report back as soon as I can. Thanks in advance!
If you prefer good ole command prompt, I have you covered 🙂
From an elevated Prompt type these two commands:
reg export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Language %userprofile%\desktop\language.reg
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Language\English_UK
To restore:
reg import %userprofile%\desktop\language.reg
Unfortunately this was not good enough for Windows. I have removed "English_UK" and rebooted.
I also checked the first (001) control set hive where control parameters are stored.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\ContentIndex\Language
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\LanguageIn both of these locations, I only have "English_US" and "Neutral". The "English_UK" key has been removed with success. But I still have "English (United Kingdom)" in system tray as a language option.
I have restored (imported) the Reg file I exported previously (all of ContentIndex). I then tried to do a German switcheroo by adding German language to the mix so I can kick out "English (United Kingdom)". That didn't work, as you can see by the screenshots below.
This is hopeless... I'm not reinstalling Windows again.
As a last test, I created a new local user account. By default, Windows adds following "preferred languages":
- English (Sweden)
- English (United States)
- English (United Kingdom)
I guess it inherits the "English (United Kingdom)" by some magical glue. But at least it's shown in the Settings app for this new account.
The display language was set to "English (United States)", as expected.
The "Swedish keyboard" was applied to "English (United States)" and to "English (United Kingdom)". The "English (Sweden)" had no keyboard applied to it. I think it only adds Swedish spell checking support, inking support and Swedish dictionary (if I'm reading the symbols/icons above correctly).
After removing "English (United Kingdom)" I am left with "English (United States)" with Swedish keyboard (what I wanted all along), and "English (Sweden)" with Swedish keyboard (this seems as if Swedish keyboard has been moved from the removed English (United Kingdom) to this English (Sweden) where there was no keyboard previously).
At this point I could just remove "English (Sweden)" and keep only "English (United States)" with Swedish keyboard. This would remove the language selection icon from system tray. Except Swedish spell checking would not work in Windows and across all apps, and I do want to intend support for more languages (UK English is just not one of them, and the reason I wanted to remove it).
The main problem with this "solution" is that this is not my user account. I would like to be able to remove "English (United Kingdom)" equally as easy on my main account as I just did on this test account.
Windows and its languages and locale settings... absolutely horrible!
Try this procedure.
Open Control Panel
Region
tab Administrative
Copy settings
Check both flags under Copy your current settings to and confirm:
Now restart and create a new local administrator user and login with it.
Check if English UK is still present in language settings.