A classic example of regional difference is American English and British English. As you might know, the word "biscuit" conjures up completely different images depending on who you talk to. Take the following image for example.

For an American, a "biscuit" is the big yellow puffy thing, whereas for a British person, biscuits are the long brown flat things. The American equivalent term for the British "biscuit" is "cookie." So, what if you actually needed to check for terms like this in Acrolinx?

If you use American English as your default region for English, you'd set up the term as follows:

You might wonder why the American term isn't set as "English (US)." If you use American English as the default region for all English content, then American English would be your parent language. You don't need to specify it as a sublanguage, because for you, American English is the default version of English that you use. British English is an exception to the guideline, so you'll need to set it up as a sublanguage.

If you didn't have British English set up already, you would add it as a data category like in the following illustration.

In the hierarchy of languages, English is the "parent" and English (GB) is the sublanguage. For sublanguage checking to work properly, you must organize all Sublanguages like this. For each language, create all regional variants as Sublanguages underneath the "parent" language.

You can get more details on organizing data categories in the article "Managing Lists and List Items for Data Categories."

Once you've got your languages set up correctly, you need to turn on sublanguage checking. You do this by updating your language configuration properties.

Once you've turned on sublanguage checking, the behavior for terminology checking works a little differently from what you might be used to. Let's compare the behavior for the previous example. Suppose that you wanted to check the following sentence:

"The cookie and the biscuit both looked delicious, but only one would go well with gravy."

So, what's different when you use sublanguage checking? When sublanguage checking is turned on, Acrolinx overrides the status for terms in other regional variants. Terms that are in your selected sublanguage are preferred over terms in other regional variants.

In our "biscuit" example, the word "cookie" is suddenly treated as deprecated because although it's English, it's not British English. When an entry contains multiple terms in same language family, Acrolinx prefers terms that match the checking language most specifically. Acrolinx treats all other terms as deprecated except the term in the specific sublanguage that you're checking. British English is more specific than just "English," so Acrolinx treats the English term as deprecated and the British English term as preferred.

In the Terminology Manager, you can also give terms the language "Multiple Languages." Usually, you set terms to "Multiple Languages" when the term stays the same, no matter what language you use. These terms are often brand and product names. For example, our own company name "Acrolinx" is always written the same way, regardless of the language we write in.

When you turn on sublanguage checking, the language "multiple languages" works in a similar way to a normal language. For example, suppose that you have the brand name "Cookie King." You want to use it in all regions except Britain, where you'll use the alternative brand name "Biscuit Baron."

Once your languages are set up correctly, you can turn on sublanguage checking in the language configuration properties.