Proofing language changes automatically

Question

Word is automatically changing my proofing language although I tried everything to stop that.

My primary display language is English, but I need the proofing language in German. Changing it on the bottom left, and setting various checkboxes will automatically result back into English (Austria) as soon as I press a key on the keyboard. I removed English in the language section of the options, but after a key, it's automatically again there, as you see here: https://streamable.com/y7kdc.

I uninstalled Word (previously installed English Word 365 + Language Pack German) and installed the German version of Word + Language Pack English, the bug is still here. 

edit: I now uninstalled Word after this help article: 

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/uninstall-office-from-a-pc-9dd49b83-264a-477a-8fcc-2fdf5dbf61d8

Reinstalled it, now even got the proper setup and no personal settings again. Still, the same bug, I cannot change it to German. This is so frustrating. 

edit: My frustration has an end! As soon as I switched my keyboard layout from

English (Austria) - German keyboard

to

German (Austria) - German keyboard

the automatic proofing language switch stopped and now stays on German (Austria).

Outstanding move by the dev, whoever thought it would be a fantastic idea to connect the keyboard layout to the proofing language. *clap*

Answer 1

Hello! I am an Independent Advisor, I would love to help you out!

I am really sorry about all the frustration you went through trying to resolve this. I am glad you did find a solution for it though! Outstanding work!

I would suggest you provide this feedback to Microsoft so hopefully, the dev team can see this and make it less frustrating and more intuitive in the future.

There are two places you can submit this.

In word itself you can go to file > feedback > suggest a feature.

This will take you to a website where you can submit a feature request. And if you send me the link I can upvote it so hopefully, it gets more traction.

The second place is in windows you can press windows key + F and fill in the information to submit feedback.

Then hopefully in future updates, this will become more intuitive!

Answer 2

To prevent Word from trying to guess the language at the insertion point, turn off the option to "Detect language automatically" at Review > Language > Set Proofing Language.

Also, when multiple keyboard languages/input languages are enabled in Windows, you can disable the "Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text" at File > Options > Advanced. See also https://support.office.com/en-us/article/automatically-switch-keyboard-to-match-language-of-surrounding-text-c7316c3a-b6b3-433f-87f4-f777cf13decc.