Multilingual spell checking (French and English) is working very well generally on my mac OS install. I set it up correctly following these recommendations.
However, there seems to be something particular with the Whatsapp Desktop application that makes it not work. Only English spell checking is happening and any word in French (not colluding with an English word of course) is underlined in red.
Is someone having the same issue? Does anyone have a solution to this?
I had the same issue with Spanish and English. I followed these instructions to change the language priority, putting Spanish over English, and the issue was resolved.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/21/set-language-priority-mac-os-x-lion-auto-correct/
Let me propose a simple workaround that worked perfectly for me. Issue: my system language is US English and I want WhatsApp spellchecker in Portuguese.
I‘ve downloaded from https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1947 the Portuguese spellcheck dictionary: pt-BR-3-0.bdic.
In the folder C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\WhatsApp\Dictionaries is located the US English spellcheck dictionary: “en-US-8-0.bdic”. I’ve rename it to “en-US-8-0.org.bdic”. Then I copied the Portuguese dictionary to this folder and renamed it to “en-US-8-0.bdic”.
That is all. Hope can help some of you.
Update: This workaround no longer works since Whatsapp start to manage the integrity of the installed package.
Even two years later on MacOS 11.1 (Big Sur) I have the same issue. Mac OS spell checking for me is on 'Dutch' but Whatsapp keeps forcing spell checking to 'English'. Sloppy work by Facebook, more interested in collecting my data than delevering a proper user experience.
Grtz, Sander.
I continue to have this issue as well. I followed the instructions at the link shared by Guillermo, making Spanish (for me) the top language and English second, and it helped, but is not 100%.
I have the same issue with the WhatsApp desktop app. I am on MacBook Pro last model and OSx Big Sur. My problem is that I write in 5 languages and the above suggested change in priority language would not work for me. I just switched nack to WhatsApp within Safari which works well since it detects automatically any other five languages are use and suggest corrections if necessary. However, I found a separate desktop app more comfortable and would've liked to continue to use it. I tried the new Whats App eta interface but that somehow didn't work for me, can't remember why🙂. But I do remember though is that the language detection in the WA desktop app worked quite okay in the beginning.
