How can I change the language in chromium?

After trying many solutions that did not work for me, here's something that just worked fine.

 sudo apt-get install chromium-browser-l10n

I use version 6.0.472.63 and I found Change font and language settings under Customize and control Chromium --> Options --> Under the hood.

There is a preference to set the language preference for web pages: in the “Preferences” dialog (which may be called differently in your version), in the “Under the Hood” tab, click “Change font and language settings”.

This doesn't give you full control (you can only select languages that Chrome knows about, and there won't be a * at the end to make the server fall back on whatever it has available if it doesn't happen to know your language). In the Preferences file in your profile (i.e. typically ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences), you can tune the setting more finely:

{ "intl": { "accept_languages": "en_US,en_GB,en,de_DE,de,*", }, }

(The syntax is JSON. Edit the existing "intl" section.)

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The language of the user interface is determined by the LC_MESSAGES environment variable, which is the standard setting under unix. At least, this is the case for Google Chrome 9.0.597.45 under Debian (from Google's apt repository); Chromium under Ubuntu lucid seems determined to speak to me in English.