How to change language when the client won't let you
If you've ever gone on vacation to another country and wanted to play League on their servers for the improved latency, but you didn't want to use their language in the client, because--hey--it's not your native language, unfortunately the League client does not let you do this. This is stupid, and RIOT either doesn't care or doesn't agree that this is an easy boon to the usability of their client, but of course they're wrong like they are about everything; so here's how to change it, in spite of their rudeness. This process has changed since they moved their config files around, and nobody has posted instructions yet (at least ones that are easily findable via a search engine), so I'm posting this to save you the hassle of having to figure it all out on your own.
- Locate the installation folder for League of Legends. On Windows, the default installation path is "C:\Riot Games\League of Legends"
- Navigate to the settings file. This is located in "Config\LeagueClientSettings.yaml". A yaml file is a standard app settings file-type.
- Open the LeagueClientSettings.yaml file in a text editor.
- Scroll down to where it has "globals:". Replace the locale with whatever your preferred locale is. For example, the locale for US English is "en_US".
Locales: en_US - US English es_MX - Mexican Spanish (Español)
If your language is not listed here, check the screenshots posted on Imgur to find your locale.
If yours is not listed there (if they add a new language in the future), you can find out what it is by reading the "system.yaml" file in the "League of Legends" folder. All of the server regions are documented here under the "regions" section. For example, the North American server's locales are in the "NA" section, and the Latin America servers are under "LA1" and "LA2". This file should not be modified. Doing so will result in the League Client patcher overwriting it with a copy from the LoL servers.
