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Two commands to set up the language aspects

Today, with the international use of the UTF-8 standard for input and output encoding, you only need two commands, with the language tag you want in brackets:

\mainlanguage[tag]
to set the language of auto-generated language elements, like the title of the table of contents or the appendix.
\language[tag]
to change the hyphenation rules, quotation marks, all that sort of thing, to that of a different language. (The default language is English.)

ConTeXt's markup

ConTeXt has a multilingual interface to enable users to work in their own language. It is specified by setting the ConTeXt interface value in the first line of your input file:

Language-specific pages

Language tags

Here's the list of ConTeXt's language tags, also available in the latest official Languages manual. Sources are available).

\usemodule[languages-system]
\loadinstalledlanguages
\showinstalledlanguages

 

Other links

Finally, for older content, we keep a page Encodings and Regimes - Old Content about including accents, composite characters, and how "ä" and alike were produced in LaTeX/ConTeXt mkii. Second Step gave an example for german language.