In addition to what gull04 (rightfully) said: there is no "Linux language"! Unlike Windows in Linux everything is controlled by a "language setting", which is basically done in the environment. There are the variables "LANG" and some others all starting with "LC_". Issue the two commands

Code:

set | grep '^LC_'
echo $LANG

to see them in a terminal window. You probably see an output like this:

Code:

# set | grep '^LC_'
LC_ADDRESS=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_AT.UTF-8
LC_TIME=C

# echo $LANG
C

Because of the i.e. LC_TIME setting date will display the date and time in an international format. Would it be set like the others ("de_AT.UTF-8", the austrian variety of german) its output would change:

Code:

# export LC_TIME=C
# date
Thu Nov  8 11:26:25 CET 2018

# export LC_TIME=de_AT.UTF-8
# date                      
Do Nov  8 11:29:22 CET 2018

Notice that the day of week was named "Thu" (Thursday) first and "Do" ("Donnerstag", which is german for Thursday) in the second.

The same goes for all the other aspects of behavior in UNIX: whatever language- or even culturally-related aspect there is it is controlled by these environment variables: LC_COLLATE will tell utilities like sort which sort order to apply. Easy, you might think, but does the german "ö" come before or after the "o", hmm? And is uppercase to be before or after lowercase? Actually, that depends - it depends on the setting of LC_COLLATE.

All this is called the "locale" and since this is just a bunch of environment variables you can easily set them to whatever value you want. I prefer "C", which is a "base" locale: english as language, ASCII characters instead of unicode characters, etc.. Try the following on the commandline:

Code:

export LANG=C
export LC_ALL=C

and you will get everything in english: man page output, diagnostic messages, etc. Instead of "C" you could also use something like "en_GB.UTF-8" (british english using unicode 8bit-characters) or "de_DE.UTF-8" (Germanies german using unicode 8-bit characters) and so on. You can (in theory - to make a consistent locale is a lot of effort) even create your own locale and use that. To have Linux speak elvish and use "ropes" instead of "miles" as a measurement of length surely might appeal to some. ;-))

So, the bottom line is: just set your locale to what you want and if you want that effect to be lasting you should do that in your sessions startup scripts: ~/.profile and, depending on which shell you use, ~/.kshrc, ~/.bashrc, ~/.cshrc or whatever.

I hope this helps.

bakunin