Garmin GPS Language Options
By Rachel Murdock
Updated September 15, 2017
Garmin makes and sells personal Global Positioning Systems, or GPS devices. According to Business Week, Garmin was one of the first companies to sell the devices. The company sells GPS devices all around the world, utilizing languages, maps, and guides specific to individual countries and continents.
Default Languages
The default language is determined by the location the GPS device was sold in. In North America, the default language is English. It's German in Germany, French in France and so forth.
Language Options
Different versions of the Garmin have different language options, but Garmin Connect, the online community for Garmin users, supports a total of 20 languages. As of 2010, those languages were English, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Danish, Slovenian, Czechoslovakian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Croatian, French, Hungarian, Finnish, Russian, and Greek.
Asian Versions
Garmin produces special versions of its nuvi product for North Americans preferring to hear Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Korean, Japanese or Taiwanese languages.
Oxford Language Travel Guide
Garmin's optional Oxford Language Travel Guide can be uploaded to many of its GPS products. It has a multilingual word bank and phrase bank, plus five bilingual dictionaries. It supports American English, British English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, European Spanish and Latin American Spanish.
References
Writer Bio
Rachel Murdock published her first article in "The Asheville Citizen Times" in 1982. Her work has been published in the "American Fork Citizen" and "Cincinnati Enquirer" as well as on corporate websites and in other online publications. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in journalism at Brigham Young University and a Master of Arts in mass communication at Miami University of Ohio.