Add International English keyboard in windows 10 through the powershell

Question

It is a known issue that in windows 10 when you decide to add multiple languages you end up with several keyboards that you can not get rid off. A well known solution that I have used in order to have only Greek and English keyboards is to create a powershell script that runs on startup with the following content.

$1 = Get-WinUserLanguageList
$1.RemoveAll( { $args[0].LanguageTag -clike '*' } )
$1.Add("el")
$1.Add("en-US")
Set-WinUserLanguageList $1 -Force

The minor problem that I have is that instead of plain English I want to use the English International qwerty keyboard so that I can add French accents for example. The label of this keyboard when installed on the tray is EN-INTL.

I know that the line I need to modify is $1.Add("en-US") but I am not aware which attribute to use.

Does anyone has this information to share?

Kind Regards, Alexios

Exsanguinate

You can easily get rid of those extra keyboard (though sometimes they come back) by adding the keyboard via the Win10 settings UI (it is not shown sometimes there but is shown at the taskbar tray when you try to switch languages) and then REMOVING it again. If you mean that each language has its own default keyboard, then you have to add one of your own, make it default and remove the default one I guess. Regarding your approach I think you shouldn't mess with the languages & locales (those would bring their defaults) but try to find command for adding specific keyboards to specific languages – Swarth

...I see somebody already pointed you to changing Input Methods for specific languages, that's the correct approach indeed, not just changing the languages – Swarth

Answer 1

I don't know the answer to this. I know how you can find the answer to this:

1. Manually set the keyboard language to US International (or any other). Note that this is considered as a "Layout" not as a language like "en-US".
2. Run in powershell Get-WinUserLanguageList

Example Output:

PS C:\> Get-WinUserLanguageList
LanguageTag     : en-US
Autonym         : English (United States) 
EnglishName     : English (United States) 
LocalizedName   : English (United States) 
ScriptName      : Latin
InputMethodTips : {0409:00000409}
Handwriting     : False 
LanguageTag     : fr-FR
Autonym         : français (France) 
EnglishName     : French (France) 
LocalizedName   : French (France) 
ScriptName      : Latin
InputMethodTips : {040c:0000040c}
Handwriting     : False

Note the number in setting InputMethodTips. In this example it's 0409:00000409.

3. You change your script to this. The number 0409:00020409 is what you want for English International layout:

$1 = Get-WinUserLanguageList
$1.RemoveAll( { $args[0].LanguageTag -clike '*' } )
$1.Add("el")
$1.Add("en-US")
$1[1].InputMethodTips.Clear() # 1 is the second language → en-US
$1[1].InputMethodTips.Add('0409:00020409') # You change this to the number you got from step #1
Set-WinUserLanguageList -LanguageList $1 -Force 

You now have the English International layout for your second language en-US.

Cheers

Berceuse

Answer 2

Try to ‘$1.Add('0409:00000409')’

Nightrider