Does anyone know how to make the spell checkers bilingual?

My family and friends often use German words in conversation, and the spell checker insists on changing them to English... and often an entirely wrong word, forcing us to constantly spell-check the spell checker. Guten, as in Guten Tag, will come out as Gluten, in iMessage and other Apple apps. Even here in this question, it's highlighted as a questionable spelling. Without manually adding specific German words to the "dictionary", I'd like to have the spell checker check both English and German dictionaries and at least offer a visible choice, instead of arbitrarily changing it.


I occasionally use French or Spanish as well, but not nearly as often and I'm already in the habit of manually checking the spelling where I can. But iMessage doesn't always give you that choice.

iMac 24″

Posted on Mar 17, 2025 2:13 PM

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Posted on Mar 18, 2025 5:25 AM

David Fields wrote: I'd like to have the spell checker check both English and German dictionaries

For multilingual spellcheck, you can go to system settings > keyboard > text input > edit > spelling and go to the very bottom of the list and choose Setup. Then you get a choice of boxes to check for languages for the "Automatic by Language" option. Just check the ones you want.


Some users find this works well, others not so much....


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 18, 2025 5:25 AM in response to David Fields

David Fields wrote: I'd like to have the spell checker check both English and German dictionaries

For multilingual spellcheck, you can go to system settings > keyboard > text input > edit > spelling and go to the very bottom of the list and choose Setup. Then you get a choice of boxes to check for languages for the "Automatic by Language" option. Just check the ones you want.


Some users find this works well, others not so much....


Last section of


Get typing suggestions and correct mistakes on Mac - Apple Support



Mar 17, 2025 10:05 PM in response to David Fields

The spellchecker uses the keyboard language to determine how to spellcheck. You can change the keyboard on iPhone in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards, then press Add New Keyboard. On Mac, go to System Settings > Keyboard, then under Text Input click Edit and add German as a layout. Bilingual keyboards can be set on iPhone, but I'm not aware of any such feature on Mac.


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Does anyone know how to make the spell checkers bilingual?

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