How to enable and use per app languages on Android 13

Google surprised everyone by releasing the latest version of its Android operating system before the newest lineup of its hardware devices, and Android 13 is now available before the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. In the past, I’ve toyed with the idea of changing the system language on the phone in order to better facilitate my immersive language learning efforts.

However, because I’m so new to learning Japanese, it simply wasn’t viable to keep the entire OS converted to that language. It was too difficult to gain the full context of my Calendar, the latest news, and more and ended up swapping back to English. Sadly, there was no middle ground, and my fun little experiment came to an end.

With the release of Android 13 though, something interesting happened. Google created a way for users to toggle from their native language to an alternate one per app instead of system-wide! Today, I’m going to show you how to enable and use per app languages so that you too can benefit from smaller, more controlled doses of language immersion. For some of you who are bilingual, this feature may be more necessary than casually interesting because you may feel more comfortable reading specific apps in your native language as opposed to the language you’re accustomed to speaking and interacting in for business or otherwise.

To get started, simply open the Settings app on your Android phone and navigate to the “System” section. From there, tap on “Languages & Input” and finally “App Languages”. If you’d like to, you can simply open Settings on your phone and use the search bar at the top to type in “App Languages” as a means of getting there much quicker. You can see an example of this process below!

From the app languages list, you’ll see any and all apps that are compatible with this feature. What you’ll realize though is that not all of your apps are capable of jumping between languages, and each developer will have to make this possible on a case-by-case basis.

Luckily, many of your native Google apps can be toggled back and forth at your leisure, and it makes for a wonderful way to feel more comfortable and at home with your device or to use it as a real-time learning resource. If you do change something like Calendar to Japanese, for example, just keep in mind that the UI will convert, but the events will not since they were created using user-created text.

I just want the steps!

1. Open “Settings” on your Android 13 device
2. Navigate to “System”
3. Tap “Languages & Inputs”
4. Open “App Languages”
5. Select an app you want to convert
6. Choose a new language from the list of those available
7. Open that app from your phone’s app launcher and see the results!