Alain M. Lafon has an interesting post on spellchecking in Emacs. Lafon is Swiss and therefore has to deal with four official languages as well as German and English in his day-to-day life. The Swiss with their usual efficiency handle that just fine but their polyglot ways means that a single document may contain text in two or more languages. The question is: what’s a good way of handling spellchecking in Emacs?
Well, it is Emacs so of course you can do that but it’s a bit trickier than you might expect. Lafon’s post gives step-by-step instructions for setting up spelling checking using multiple dictionaries.
The only potential wrinkle is that you have to use Hunspell if you want to have dictionaries for more than one language. If you’re on macOS (or Linux), you can install hunspell with Homebrew so it’s not much of a problem. Lafon gives the magic spell for apt users. If you use Homebrew, you’ll have to download the dictionaries separately but they’re available from the OpenOffice Extensions page.
Most of you—at least if we’re not Swiss—probably won’t have to worry spellchecking in multiple languages in the same buffer, but if you do, Lafon’s post tells you how to handle it.
UPDATE : Added link to Lafon’s post.