Adding and removing keyboard languages with PowerShell

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Bryce McDonald

Bryce is an expert systems engineer with the majority of his experience in Powershell, automation, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure. He is based in Kansas City and you can reach him on twitter @_brycemcdonald or on his blog brycematthew.net.

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Adding languages

It's simple to look at the language list, as PowerShell has a built-in cmdlet for this.

$LanguageList = Get-WinUserLanguageList

When we view the contents of $LanguageList, we'll see the object returned. And if US English is your only chosen keyboard language, your output should look like the following:

PS> $LanguageList
LanguageTag     : en-US
Autonym         : English (United States)
EnglishName     : English
LocalizedName   : English (United States)
ScriptName      : Latin script
InputMethodTips : {0409:00000409}
Spellchecking   : True
Handwriting     : False

Creating a LanguageList object

If we want to add a language, we can use an easy method to accomplish this task. All we need to do is apply the Add method to our $LanguageList object to add the locale of the keyboard language we want to use. For instance, if we want to add Lithuanian to the keyboard list, we'd add lt-LT first to our object

$LanguageList.Add("lt-LT")

If we now view the contents of this, it should look like the following:

PS> $LanguageList
LanguageTag     : en-US
Autonym         : English (United States)
EnglishName     : English
LocalizedName   : English (United States)
ScriptName      : Latin script
InputMethodTips : {0409:00000409}
Spellchecking   : True
Handwriting     : False
LanguageTag     : lt-LT
Autonym         : lietuvių
EnglishName     : Lithuanian
LocalizedName   : Lithuanian
ScriptName      : Latin script
InputMethodTips : {0427:00010427}
Spellchecking   : True
Handwriting     : False

Assuming we're ready to set the language list to include Lithuanian, all we have to do now is run the cmdlet below:

Set-WinUserLanguageList $LanguageList

Adding Lithuanian to LanguageList

Removing languages with indexes

Unfortunately, we can't simply remove the lt-LT language from our language list with PowerShell. In fact, trying to remove it will return a False from PowerShell.

PS> $LanguageList.Remove("lt-LT")
False

This is because the $LanguageList object we created from our Get-WinUserLanguageList cmdlet doesn't actually contain strings, and it is not an array. It's an object of the type List<WinUserLanguage>.

What we can do, however, is call the index position of our $LanguageList object to choose which language we want to remove. By inspecting our $LanguageList object, we can look at the second index position to find the Lithuanian keyboard language.

PS>$LanguageList[1]
LanguageTag     : lt-LT
Autonym         : lietuvių
EnglishName     : Lithuanian
LocalizedName   : Lithuanian
ScriptName      : Latin script
InputMethodTips : {0427:00010427}
Spellchecking   : True
Handwriting     : False

Trying to remove It LT language from the language list

When we combine that with the Remove method, we're able to strip the Lithuanian keyboard from our $LanguageList object. This is because the method is expecting us to use a WinUserLanguage object. By simply calling the string "lt-LT" through the Remove method, it is not passing enough information to our $LanguageList object. The WinUserLanguage object is full of information like BCP-47, Autonym, English Name, Localized Name, Script, Input Methods, and Handwriting Recognition (we can see all of this by piping our $LanguageList object to Get-Member).

Moving forward though, let's remove the second language in our language list by referring to it in the Remove method by way of array notation (keeping in mind that "Position 2" in an array is actually "1").

$LanguageList.Remove($LanguageList[1])

And when we look at our object one last time, we will see it only lists English. Once we have a list of languages we're happy with, just like before, we can use our Set-LanguageList cmdlet to set the keyboards available to us.

Set-WinUserLanguageList $LanguageList

Adding Lithuanian to LanguageList

Removing languages by locale

The other option we have, other than knowing the index of the language we want to remove, is to add some logic that allows us to search with our locale string. For this, we have to use the searching capabilities of Where-Object in our Remove method to find the locale string within the LanguageTag property of our $LanguageList object.

$LanguageList.Remove(($LanguageList | Where-Object LanguageTag -like 'lt-LT'))

This will return True, and we follow it up again with our Set command:

Set-WinUserLanguageList $LanguageList

Removing Lithuanian with index notation

This is a more deployable command, in case your environment allows your users to customize which keyboards they have access to. Using this Remove method will let you avoid accidentally removing a language your user wishes to have by incorrectly referencing it with the array notation.

And there you have it! From the two ways I showed you, you now know how to add and remove keyboard languages for Windows users.