How does one change the language of the command line interface of Git?

Question

I’d like to change the language of git (to English) in my Linux installation without changing the language for other programs and couldn’t find the settings. How to do it?

Answer 1

Add these lines to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zprofile to force git to display all messages in English:

# Set Git language to English
#alias git='LANG=en_US git'
alias git='LANG=en_GB git'

The alias needs to override LC_ALL on some systems, when the environment variable LC_ALL is set, which has precedence over LANG. See the UNIX Specification - Environment Variables for further explanation.

# Set Git language to English
#alias git='LC_ALL=en_US git'
alias git='LC_ALL=en_GB git'

In case you added these lines to ~/.bashrc the alias will be defined when a new interactive shell gets started. In case you added it to ~/.bash_profile the alias will be applied when logging in.

Answer 2

If you just want to have one command in english instead you can just write LC_ALL=C before the command, for example:

LC_ALL=C git status

will result in

# On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean

The locale as used in C is English and always available without installing additional language packs
(see https://askubuntu.com/a/142814/34298)

To change it for the whole current bash session just enter

LANG=C

To change it for example to german enter

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8