Selected Group Language not honored by created Sharepoint site

[Peter Allan]

Dear Community,

Whenever I create a group, the created SharePoint site has a different default language.

I always select english, but the created site has a default set as german. Interestingly the Site is only partially german 

Most menue items are in englisch, but pages for whatever reason is in German. See "Seiten"

Microsoft support says this is related to my tenant location, which is set for Austria. It is however stupid to select a default tenant language on location (There are several countries with mutliple official languages). Also we are an english speaking company which just happens to be located in Austria.

It is frustratign that Microsoft is pushing us to embrace groups, and the assest created by groups don't honor the group setting.

Any Ideas how to work around this? Thanks

[#2]

Out of curiosity, do you use the browser to create Groups? If yes, what is the language of the browser?

[#3]

Yes I create groups via the admin portal.

The browser as well as the entire system language is english. 

[#4]

In my case, I have seen this, but with Spanish language @Christophe Fiessinger FYI

[#5 · Accepted solution]

Update:

After a long call with Microsoft support I was told this.

- The SharePoint default language is determined by the tenant language
- Your cannot pick the tenant language during setup. It is derived from your browser location
- If you create an office 365 group, the language of the SharePoint site will be the tenant language, independent of the Group Language you select.

I tried to reason, that this is a bug, especially since the outcome is bi-lingual SharePoint site and the ticket must not be closed. My request was refused and it was declared "works as designed"

Just so you know!

[#6]

The default language of each created O365 Group site will be the same as the default language of the root level site collection of your tenant. It's technically possible to remove this site collection and recreate it with the desired language which will then be the new default language of your new O365 Group sites

[#7]

All correct - for folks monitoring this thread please note the recent blog post we published around self-service site creation updates: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Updates-to-SharePoint-self-service-... - which includes a new language selector to set the default site language at creation time to something other than the default tenant language. Note this only sets the site language, not the group mailbox language. Hope this helps!

[#8]

Thanks for the update, can't see anything about the API's but I assume will this language option will also be available in the API's to create modern O365 Group sites?

[#9]

@ Sean Squires I get the option to select a language for my group, but it is still not honoured! Everything is set to English, my Windows, my browser, my group, but still the group is created in Dutch! Also the first screen asking to connect to Team Site is in Dutch, whereas my OneDrive for Business (which I use as the entry point to create the Group) is in English.

I am out of my wits here. I teach Office 365 and I will be teaching my English-speaking students to create a group, but I can't show them in English.

[#10]

@IrisDR 

you can create a site with the desired default language, then swap the existing site

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/invoke-spositeswap?view=sharepo...

[#11]

I think I have found the newest official introduction: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sites/plan-for-the-multilingual-user-interface
It says :The MUI feature enables users to collaborate in a single site by using another language that they prefer, regardless of which language was selected when the site was created.
So, we just need to change current user's preferred language~