SET LANGUAGE

Specifies the language environment for the session. The session language determines the datetime formats and system messages.

Syntax

SET LANGUAGE { [ N ] 'language' | @language_var }

Arguments

[N]'language' | @language_var

Is the name of the language as stored in syslanguages. This argument can be either Unicode or DBCS converted to Unicode. To specify a language in Unicode, use N'language'. If specified as a variable, the variable must be sysname.

Remarks

The setting of SET LANGUAGE is set at execute or run time and not at parse time.

Permissions

SET LANGUAGE permissions default to all users.

Examples

This example sets the default language to us_english.

SET LANGUAGE us_english
GO

See Also

Data Types

sp_helplanguage

SET

SQL Server Language Support

syslanguages (master database only)