Living in Catalonia as a Dutchman means I navigate four languages daily: Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, and English. When it comes to my devices, though, I have a clear preference: Dutch. That’s the language in which I think most deeply, and I want my interface in my native tongue.
That preference ran into a wall when we installed a HomePod. Since Siri doesn’t support Catalan, my wife and I settled on Spanish as the household language for it. What I hadn’t anticipated was what that meant for every other device in the house: all members of a HomePod household must use the same Siri language. My devices had to follow the HomePod’s lead and use Siri in Spanish, even though my OS remained in Dutch.
Then Apple Intelligence arrived and made things more complicated: system language and Siri language now had to match. I tried a Spanish OS for a while, but eventually concluded that Dutch simply works better for me and decided to skip Apple Intelligence rather than compromise.
During a recent clean reinstall, I set up my devices fresh without restoring from a backup. A few days in, I noticed something unexpected: Siri was responding in Dutch. It had defaulted to my system language during setup, and apparently nothing was blocking it anymore. The HomePod restriction I had struggled with for so long seemed to have quietly disappeared, possibly a change that came in with Apple Intelligence, even if I am not using it.
A small discovery with a surprisingly big impact on daily comfort.
