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The user should be able to tell the spell checker to check in many languages at the same time. Thus to detect the language of the text and from the selected spell checkers choose the right dictionary to highlight and offer corrections.

Such as:

"This is an English sentence und die ist ein Satz in deutscher Sprache with some German in it juz for fun." So the spell checker would offer das for die and just for juz.

With my translator hat on: sorry, but that makes no sense to me, why on earth would you mix more than one language in the same sentence. Even when you quote in another language, that is not happening very often, I don't see the point of having a multilingual spell check at once.
Also, which exact spell checker do you mean? KDE and Plasma use external spell checkers, none is made by us.

@Mamarok,

Granted that is a clumsy example. I apologise for that, the post was hastily written.

If you're translating one volume of text to another language, I can't see you why would you need a two language spell checker. When you quote as source text, why would you change it? You're right in that context this doesn't make sense.

If you're not translating a text, rather perhaps writing an assignment as part of an educational program. Where one language governs the structure and flow of the document that may be in one language. Other sections may be written in the learner's language of study. Or perhaps a creative writer making a kind of creole of their text or switching rapidly from one community to the next rapidly. An example of the latter might be where a writer from poly lingual region is writing about their community where two languages are used for specific contexts, often the language of government and then the community language. You might be a multilingual application developer and include the various hint texts in one resource file.

There are a lot more multilingual people in the world than there are native English language users. This is probably true for other languages but I couldn't with confidence suggest which. The point is, this might help these other language users and I'm not trying suggest an "English vs X" bias, it could be any combination.

To answer your point "which exact spell checker do you mean? KDE and Plasma use external spell checkers, none is made by us." In modern software development the spell checker is an abstract object. You write a text editor, you grab some text, you pass it to your spell checker object, it returns an abstract result that allows you format the text on the screen and offer the specific options to the user that may have come as a result of that result set. As a feature this could sit above the actual spell checker (although it would be best implemented in the spell checker).

You may be right, I hadn't considered that KDE & Plasma use external spell checkers. As a user, I don't generally look to see which libraries are pulled in from external providers and which are home grown. Wouldn't a feature request be as valid, if one were to ask for a feature in a Plasma widget which when it came down to it was dependant on the underlying QT implementation?

One simple way to implement this feature would be when you select a block of text and when you've chosen your two or more languages, from your context sensitive menu you get a choice of spell checking dictionaries to choose from.

Thank you for your helpful response. I hope I've explained myself better this time.

I have several languages installed (five if that matters, as I speak them), including the language packs with the individual spell checkers. If I want to spell check e.g. in LibreOffice, I can't activate multilingual checking in one go, I have to change the language every time for the document, so I doubt Plasma can change any of this. I suggest you address this to the applications that use spell checkers to implement this, Again, KDE and Plasma might be the wrong addressee for this kind of request.
FWIW: I occasionally use MS Word as well, and there as well there is no way to spell check more than one language simultaneously in the same document, this only works in specific text portions.

Do you have a concrete example of a system that allows this kind of spell checking?

Hi @Mamarok,

I don't have a concrete example, no. Though it was KDE as a whole that I was thinking of when I suggested this, i.e. Kate, Kopete, Kmail, KWord etc. I was thinking that an integration like this needs to be seamless and integrate with the input method selection which broadens the scope from a specific application to system wide. When you make regional changes in KDE these don't affect your console character set or the underlying system. If I were to go further I'd argue that KDE needs an overhaul of how it manages and integrates human languages. Sorry this is creeping beyond the scope of the original post but this indication of depth gives better context.

I will put this to LibreOffice, as I do think having to change the language at the document level is clunky.

For my part I have attempted language learning a few times. Though, I'm not very good at it.

I think this is quite an important issue. While automatic detection is way too prone to misdetection at the moment. I do not see why we cound not have language on paragraph level at least. That would be great help when one works with multilingual documents. Especially, if we could include the language settings into the styles, where changing styles would change the paragraph default language.

On word level, I think, it is more difficult. Format works on character and paragraph level, so I assume it would much harder to implement. But I am no programmer, nor involved in any office project.

Again, this needs to be solved by the individual programs. So make a feature request to the text editor of your choice to implement this.

If you want to type and have multilingual spell check, you can do that in vim, it even let's you add words to a personalized dictionary. it's quite simple and there are tons of documentation out there. Getting used to terminal is not that hard, but you also have gui options.
Multilingual spell check should be working on kde using sonnet (works with aspell, hspell and hunspell as backend) compatible apps, more info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_(software)

I'll start testing this today, so I'll keep you posted of how things move along.