View and Edit Contact Languages

Mailchimp attempts to detect each contact's browser language when they join your audience, update their profile, or click links in your emails. You can use this language information to segment your contacts, translate content, or load conditional content in forms and emails.

In this article, you'll learn how to view and edit language preferences for your contacts.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you get started.

• When you manually add a subscribed contact to your audience, their profile will display Not yet detected under the Language heading until the language is detected. This also happens when you import your contacts with nothing mapped to the Language column, or if a specific contact doesn't have a language code indicated in the import file.

View or edit individual contacts

To view or edit the language preference for a contact, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the contact you want to edit.
4. In the contact's profile, click Settings. Next to Language, click the drop-down menu and choose the language for your contact.

Edit multiple contacts

If you need to update the language for a lot of contacts at once, you can import a properly formatted import file with the new information. Include a column for Language, and insert the language code for each contact's preference. To function correctly, language codes must be formatted exactly as shown.

When you import the file into Mailchimp, you'll match your Language column to the Language field and click Save.

On the Organize step, make sure to check the box next to Update existing contacts.

Language codes

English = en
Arabic = ar
Afrikaans = af
Belarusian = be
Bulgarian = bg
Catalan = ca
Chinese = zh
Croatian = hr
Czech = cs
Danish = da
Dutch = nl
Estonian = et
Farsi = fa
Finnish = fi
French (France) = fr
French (Canada) = fr_CA
German = de
Greek = el
Hebrew = he
Hindi = hi
Hungarian = hu
Icelandic = is
Indonesian = id
Irish = ga
Italian = it
Japanese = ja
Khmer = km
Korean = ko
Latvian = lv
Lithuanian = lt
Maltese = mt
Malay = ms
Macedonian = mk
Norwegian = no
Polish = pl
Portuguese (Brazil) = pt
Portuguese (Portugal) = pt_PT
Romanian = ro
Russian = ru
Serbian = sr
Slovak = sk
Slovenian = sl
Spanish (Mexico) = es
Spanish (Spain) = es_ES
Swahili = sw
Swedish = sv
Tamil = ta
Thai = th
Turkish = tr
Ukrainian = uk
Vietnamese = vi

Next steps

Now that you know how to view or edit language settings for your contacts, here are some ways to use this information.

• Organize contacts by language
  Create a language-based segment. This will make it easier to send targeted content. To learn more, check out Create and Send to a Segment.
• Translate your content
  Link contacts to a translated version of your content in Google Translate. To learn more, check out Translate Content in an Email.
• Add conditional content
  Display your email in different languages, depending on the recipient. To learn more, check out Use Conditional Merge Tags.