You can override the language environment chosen at startup with explicit use of the command set-language-environment, or with customization of current-language-environment in your init file.
To display information about the effects of a certain language environment lang-env, use the command C-h L lang-env <RET> (describe-language-environment). This tells you which languages this language environment is useful for, and lists the character sets, coding systems, and input methods that go with it. It also shows some sample text to illustrate scripts used in this language environment. By default, this command describes the chosen language environment.
You can customize any language environment with the normal hook set-language-environment-hook. The command set-language-environment runs that hook after setting up the new language environment. The hook functions can test for a specific language environment by checking the variable current-language-environment. This hook is where you should put non-default settings for specific language environment, such as coding systems for keyboard input and terminal output, the default input method, etc.
Before it starts to set up the new language environment, set-language-environment first runs the hook exit-language-environment-hook. This hook is useful for undoing customizations that were made with set-language-environment-hook. For instance, if you set up a special key binding in a specific language environment using set-language-environment-hook, you should set up exit-language-environment-hook to restore the normal binding for that key.
Footnotes
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If you run Emacs on X, you need to inform the X server about the location of the newly installed fonts with the following commands:
xset fp+ /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts xset fp rehash
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If more than one of these is set, the first one that is nonempty specifies your locale for this purpose.
