Frequently Asked Questions

Windows XP Home and Professional editions are released in 24 languages:

English, German, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Brazilian, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.

Windows XP also offers more localized user interface languages via the Mulitilingual User Interface (MUI) Pack. See Windows XP & Windows 2000 MUI FAQ for details.

As in Windows 2000, the language and locale support offered in Windows XP is identical in each of the language versions. Whether you're using the English version or the Arabic version, you'll find you can still input, process and display text in Greek, Japanese, Korean or any of the other languages supported in Windows XP.

In addition to the languages supported in Windows 2000, each of the above languages has it own locale in Windows XP. Windows XP also introduces an Invariant Locale whose settings are similar to US–English International standards. For more information, see New Locale and Language Features in Windows XP.

You can find a complete list of locales supported by Windows XP in Windows XP - List of Locale IDs, Input Locale, and Language Collection.

• Improved support for existing Farsi and Urdu locales.
• More robust font display mechanism for East Asian languages.
• Improved Regional and Language Options applet in Control Panel.
• Simplified process to install support for additional languages; languages are now organized into 3 collections that can be easily installed via "Supplemental language support" in Regional and Language Options.
• Improved MUI support (XP MUI only).

For in-depth information, see Overview of Windows XP International Support, Part Two.

The level of localization coverage has been increased to about 97% in Windows XP MUI. This is in contrast to the 90% achieved in Windows 2000. For a more detailed answer, see Windows MUI FAQ.