Q: How about in Yosemite!

Thanks Tom,

I clicked and changed the flag, but no change to Safari or Finder menus yet. I will try re-opening them and then rebooting to see if that does it. Can't understand why the flag is there as a separate thing to change!

OK, restarted the mac mini. Flag has stayed Australian, and the keyboard is now working OK (Qwerty).

But the menus in Safari, Mail, Finder are all still in French, and the login requires me to type my password as if using a French keyboard.

Where does this end?!

No, Tom, I don't need to switch languages for reading (not that it bothers me much), but when I changed the keyboard the language changed. I bought the mac mini in Switzerland, and I think it wants to stay French-speaking as much as possible.

Just now Parallels had switched the flag back to French without me doing anything. (And staying logged in, by the way.).

Restarting or closing and rebooting have not affected the issues I listed above.

Well, Tom, thanks for your patience. You can see I have only been playing with macs for a couple of years, so the experience of others is so useful (given no comprehensive manuals). My first Apple device,bought in 1979, functioned a little differently, and then corporate life forced me into the IBM/PC universe till recently.

This seems to have finally worked for menus and mail etc., now all in English.

However, the flag switched itself back to Swiss French, so I deleted the Swiss keyboard option as well, and flag has disappeared. Australian was top of that list of 2, but clearly that's not strong enough to indicate a preference, pace Illaass' links above...