Language

The choice of languages is a feature that allows changing languages for people who are not familiar with English. The language menu is accessible via a button in the main menu to the left of the options button, and from the options menu.

Available languages
There are 119 languages, which are, in the order they appear in the menu:

Font
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ! @ #  $  £  %  ^  &  *    _ - + = ~ [ ] { } | \ : ; " ', < > . ? /

Minecraft's default font is made up of a grid of dots. Each character supported by the font is between 1 and 6 dots wide, although most are 5. It has some of the Unicode characters. These characters are stored in,   and   file. If a character is typed (e.g. in chat, on a sign, in a book, etc.) that isn't either in these files, the font will change to Minecraft's "Unicode font" (stored in ) that has thinner lines. The "Unicode font" supports the "BMP" (Basic Multilingual Plane) section of Unicode characters, from 0000 to FFFF (decimal 65535), which is also limited, because it's only a part of Unicode characters, not all of them. The font currently supports the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian alphabets (with support for Georgian potentially upcoming), as well as the Hebrew abjad.

For a list of characters that Minecraft retextures to display in chat, please see this command. Not all lines will display, so you should check your logs.

History
Here is a table that summarizes the modifications of languages through the updates:

Upcoming languages
Upcoming and still-in-progress translations are listed on the official Minecraft translation project page.

Removed languages
Austrian German was removed from Minecraft temporarily in version 12w01a because German was too similar to Austria German. However, it has been re-included to the game again in version Java Edition 1.10.

Issues

 * In some languages, the text is too long and overflows the button it is written on.
 * Minecraft doesn't support combining characters which leads to some characters displaying improperly, e.g. diacritics appear as a separate character in some languages like Hindi, Tamil, or Yiddish.
 * Splash texts are not translated and therefore always show up in English regardless of language setting.
 * As of 1.6.1, a custom (not just translated) splash text can be used by using a resource pack.
 * Minecraft ' s language option is only for text display. In some languages (such as Chinese, Japanese and so on) players cannot input text in their languages. This is because Minecraft doesn't support the input method of the language. Some users can still use mods which support it.
 * Alternative language input was partially resolved in 15w34c and 17w43a when was fixed, but still is not functional for all systems.

Trivia

 * Minecraft is available in six constructed languages:
 * Esperanto; devised as an international language now estimated to be spoken by about 2,000,000 people worldwide,
 * Klingon; an alien language from Star Trek devised by linguist Marc Okrand,
 * Quenya; one of the Elvish languages devised by J.R.R. Tolkien,
 * Lojban; a language created by the Logical Language Group,
 * Anglish; a language based on modern English but with all non-Germanic loan words removed,
 * Ido; a language derived from Esperanto.
 * It is also available in the joke "languages" of
 * Pirate Speak; English written in the way a stereotypical pirate talks,
 * LOLCAT; English written in the way a stereotypical Lolcat talks,
 * Upside down English,
 * Shakespearean English; English based on the literary style of William Shakespeare.


 * It is possible to add a custom language pack by modifying the minecraft.jar file, or, as of 13w16a, copying it to the assets/lang folder. In 1.6.1, this functionality was added to resource packs.
 * Before, obfuscated text would choose random characters of only the same width. Now, it's no longer the case, as all supported characters are taken into account.
 * Many glyphs are supported by the Minecraft font, but not all of them. GNU Unifont is used for several languages that use detailed characters, like Chinese or Tamil.