Change the language of the Hotmail Sign in page to login to your email account
As you may already know, you can customize your Windows Live profile and change Hotmail language so that everything visible after you login is in your language of choice. But what about the language for Hotmail Sign in screen? There is a difference: unlike your email account and Live.com profile, the page you use to login to Hotmail doesn't necessarily know who you are. For this reason, it will try to guess what the best language is by determining previous activity, your current location and the language spoken in that region, as well as your operating system's language setting (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) This tutorial will explain how to force the Hotmail sign in page to use the language you want.
Change Hotmail Sign in language for the login form and sign up page
This is how Windows Live Hotmail determines in which language to display the login screen:
- When you type "www.hotmail.com" or "www.live.com" in your web browser's address bar, you will notice that you are then redirected to another URL (internet address), which contains a bunch of question marks and ampersands ("
&") - these are "arguments", which reflect the settings Windows Live has determined best for you, including language:
- Note that we have altered the screenshot above to highlight the relevant portion of the URL, which is the argument that contains the language setting Windows Live Hotmail has chosen for you, based on the variables mentioned earlier in this tutorial.
- The value "
en-us" is simply the "ISO 639" universal language code to signify American English - in other words, Hotmail sign in has determined that we were in the United States and/or that our copy of Windows 7 was set to "American English" as language.
- So, to change the language of the Hotmail Sign in page, all you have to do is replace the value between "
&mkt=" and the next "&" ampersand with the language you want to use. The next tutorials explain how to get Hotmail Sign in English version, and how to use Hotmail Sign in Spanish version, two common requests. For other languages (assuming that they are currently supported by the Windows Live Hotmail online service), here is a list of language codes. - Fortunately, Windows Live will automatically assume some other variables, so all you have to do is manually type "
hotmail.com/?&mkt=" in your web browser's address bar, and type the correct language code at the end (as shown on the screenshot). The example below shows you how to login to Hotmail using French as default language:
And this is a simple trick that allows you to change Hotmail Sign in language on-the-fly, without affecting your Windows Live profile language settings themselves! You can also learn more about Hotmail.com to make the most of Microsoft's webmail service (online email offerings and other Windows Live services).
New Hotmail, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail & Live email are all referring to the same free webmail service offered by Microsoft and Windows Live Team (works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X). Microsoft Corporation, Apple, and other companies own the copyright or trademark to these and other terms mentioned.