Testing user preferred language of SharePoint site with PnP PowerShell

Are you testing SharePoint multi-lingual features? And want a quick way to switch languages on a site for a particular user or yourself; this can be useful when testing the modern multi-lingual features in SharePoint if you want to check the quality of the pages translated.

A while ago I created a page that can serve as a reference for the codes for each language within SharePoint, mainly so I can refer to this quickly, especially during the MSDN to Microsoft Docs transition where some reference material wasn’t easy to find. Check this out: Reference SharePoint Online Languages

You can set the language preferences in your user profile, by going to Delve > Update Profile > “ How can I change my language and regional settings ?” > Click “…” > Language and Region settings, so a few steps to get to these options. The change of preference can take a few minutes to propagate to all the sites in the tenant. Too slow for a quick play or testing language scenarios.

Before applying script in English

I have written a script that changes the MUI setting for a user within the User Information List to update the user with the appropriate language tag. Check out this code sample below to achieve this:

Connect-PnPOnline https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site>
Get-PnPListItem -List "User Information List" -Id 7 # Me

# -OR- #

$userEmail = "paul.bullock@mytenant.co.uk"
$CamlQuery = @"
<View>
    <Query>
        <Where>
            <Eq>
                <FieldRef Name='EMail' />
                <Value Type='Text'>$userEmail</Value>
            </Eq>
        </Where>
    </Query>
</View>
"@

$item = Get-PnPListItem -List "User Information List" -Query $CamlQuery

$item["MUILanguages"] = "cy-GB" #"en-GB"
$item.Update()
Invoke-PnPQuery

After Applying script in Welsh

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