How to set Esperanto as a content language in Microsoft Word?

Question

Apparently, all Microsoft Word documents need at least one content language. This / These can be different from the user interface language. The content language(s) is / are used by Word for proofing, i.e. spell checking and grammar checking, if corresponding rules are available. Thus, choosing a different language (not Esperanto) for texts that are actually written in Esperanto, gratuitously marks many words as misspelled.

Is there a way to set the content language of a text in Microsoft word to Esperanto? (Regardless of whether spell checking or grammar checking won't be available and turned off.) Is there some way of adding custom content languages to the set of available choices that Microsoft didn't think of and/or doesn't provide a Microsoft Office language pack for? Or is there at least some way to let Word know that the content language for some text is "none of these" or "other" or something like that?

Note that this question isn't about the user interface language, which is a much less pressing issue, as most Esperanto writers are capable of reading at least one other language.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any Esperanto language pack for MS Word, but I admit, that I have limited knowledge of the matter.

As a work-around you can disable spell checking all together. In previous versions there was a setting "none" for language, but as you observed not any longer (as of MS Word 2016, 2019 and Office 365 Word).

There are two settings:

• check spelling as you type
• the red squiggly lines

While the first one is simple to disable, the other one requires some tweaking. See an article how to do it.

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with the site. I haven't tested the tweak. I doubt, whether you can use it in Office 365 environment.

Answer 2

Yes, you can disable spellchecker in Office 365: Go to File>Options>Proofing and unmark the checkboxes "Check spelling as you type" and "Check grammar as you type".

Answer 3

I've just run through the internet on planet Earth, and Microsoft does not have a language pack to install for the 'universal language'. So, I suppose I'll have to create one.