Changing the Language Setting for All Document Text

Hello, Mr Wyatt,
First of all I would like to thank You for all the knowledge and really useful tips (even for n00bs in coding like me) You share with the world wide web. Thanks to your 'Writing a Macro from Scratch' and 'Generating a Count of Word Occurrences' articles which I came to via google I now have my first macros up and running. The reason to search for this particular kind of Macros is that as part of a small university team I am trying to find alternative (free) ways to automatize some parts of our content analysis work (we do not have any budget so we will do it manually - without any software). But we are working with texts (articles) written in language that is different form English and with the Sub WordFrequency VBA macro this cannot be done (I guess I have to ad some dim languageID for the goal). I would be beyond than grateful for your help with this case.
Thank You so much for your work and time.
Kind regards

If the document uses styles that are all based on one style (e.g. Normal), then you don't need any macros. All you have to do is to change the language setting of that master style (right-click on the style in the Styles gallery of the Home tab, select Modify -> Format -> Language). I tried this on a document containing a table and several text boxes, one of which contained another table, and it worked perfectly. You may need to reinitialise the spell checker (File -> Options -> Proofing -> Recheck Document) in order to see the effect of the language change on spell checking.

Of course many documents are created by people who don't understand or choose to use styles, but that shouldn't be a problem because then the whole document will be in the Normal style, in which case the above method still works. It will only fail if the original author has applied a proofing language as _direct_ formatting of content within the document. In that case, the author should be taken aside for a good talking-to.

If there are more than one shape or textbox containing text then the macro ChangeLanguage will only change the language of the text in the first. The following macro ChangeLanguageAll will change the language for the whole document including all textboxes and shapes containing a textframe.

Sub ChangeLanguageAll()
Dim r As Range
Dim p As Paragraph
Dim aShape As Shape
Dim txtFrame As TextFrame

For Each r In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
For Each p In r.Paragraphs
p.Range.LanguageID = wdEnglishUK
Next p
Next r
For Each aShape In ActiveDocument.Shapes
Set txtFrame = aShape.TextFrame
If Not txtFrame Is Nothing Then _
txtFrame.TextRange.LanguageID = wdEnglishUK
Next aShape
End Sub

Each paragraph has a language property that determines what language dictionary the spell checker will use to check the paragraph. When a new paragraph is created it gets its language setting from the style, thereafter the paragraph’s language can be changed to another language and it will remain until the style is re-applied or another style applied.

Language can also be applied to individual words or groups of words within a paragraph and this overrides the paragraph’s language setting for those words. They can occur if text is copied from another paragraph or another document that has a different language setting. Individual word settings will not change if the paragraph’s style is changed or renewed, the only way to remove them is by selecting the whole paragraph and setting the desired proofing language.

Language can also be applied to individual characters with curious results.