Encountered this problem yesterday after upgrading under Saucy from KDE 4.11.2 to 4.11.3. Thinking it might be caused by misconfiguration I did some reseach wich cost me almost a day without fixing it .-( But I hope thus I can at least provide some useful addtional information :-)

1. After the update I first noticed that the spell checking in kmail was gone. I couldn't choose the language any more and spell checking doesn't work for preset German any more. Neither could I choose system language nor make any additional language or location settings  in systemsettings. Furthermore I noticed that the little widget I use to switch my keyboard from German to English or Spanish doesn't show the flags anymore. And even though all application I set to use other languages than system language still use these, at least for menus, I couldn't change the language anymore.


2.  Somehow language setting got totally messed up during the update.

locale -a produces following output, which shows all the three languages I have installed:

knut@knubuntu:~$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_AT.utf8
de_BE.utf8
de_CH.utf8
de_DE.utf8
de_LI.utf8
de_LU.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZMSin nombre
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
es_AR.utf8
es_BO.utf8
es_CL.utf8
es_CO.utf8
es_CR.utf8
es_CU
es_CU.utf8
es_DO.utf8
es_EC.utf8
es_ES.utf8
es_GT.utf8
es_HN.utf8
es_MX.utf8
es_NI.utf8
es_PA.utf8
es_PE.utf8
es_PR.utf8
es_PY.utf8
es_SV.utf8
es_US.utf8
es_UY.utf8
es_VE.utf8
POSIX

But invoking just locale produces weird results:

knut@knubuntu:~$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=es_C.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=es:de:en_GB:en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="es_C.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Please notice the weird locale es_C.UTF-8.

After further investigation I encountered the file ~/.kde/env/setlocale.sh with following contents:

export LANG=es_C.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=es:de:en_GB:en_US:en

Deleting it I at least got rid of "es_C.UTF-8". BTW, as a look into my backups revealed, above mentioned file didn't exist before the update. At least it did not exist a week before the update and meanwhile I did not make any changes to the localization.

3. Hoping this might fix the problem I shortly after the update to 4.11.3. updated to 4.12 from the backport ppa's. It did not help. I suppose the problem is caused by a bug in the package systemsettings which inspite of the update to 4.12 still is 4:4.11.3-0ubuntu01. At least I could not find any other kde related package responsible for language settings.  language-selctor-kde, as proposed in a post I found, doesn't exist in the Saucy repositories.

BTW, I installed language-selctor-gnome and could access all localization setting for gnome application without problem. Thus I suppose this is a kde related problem.

Here the basics again:

 knut@knubuntu:~$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:    core-2.0-ia32:core-2.0-noarch:core-3.0-ia32:core-3.0-noarch:core-3.1-ia32:core-3.1-noarch:core-3.2-ia32:core-3.2-noarch:core-4.0-ia32:core-4.0-noarch:core-4.1-ia32:core-4.1-noarch:security-4.0-ia32:security-4.0-noarch:security-4.1-ia32:security-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 13.10
Release:        13.10
Codename:       saucy

knut@knubuntu:~$ uname -a
Linux knubuntu 3.11.0-14-generic #21-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 12 17:07:40 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

knut@knubuntu:~$ kded4 --version
Qt: 4.8.4
KDE Development Platform: 4.12.0
KDE Daemon: 4.12.0

Package systemsettings is 4:4.11.3-0ubuntu01

Furtherrmore I add some screenshots made from kmail and systemsettings.

I hope this information may help fix the bug soon.


Knut