[[language-intro]]
== Getting Started with Languages

Elasticsearch ships with a collection of language analyzers that provide
good, basic, out-of-the-box (((“language analyzers”)))(((“languages”, “getting started with”)))support for many of the world’s most common
languages:

Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese,
Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek,
Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish,
Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish,
Turkish, and Thai.

These analyzers typically(((“language analyzers”, “roles performed by”))) perform four roles:

• Tokenize text into individual words:
  +
  The quick brown foxes -> [The, quick, brown, foxes]

• Lowercase tokens:
  +
  The -> the

• Remove common stopwords:
  +
  [The, quick, brown, foxes] -> [quick, brown, foxes]

• Stem tokens to their root form:
  +
  foxes -> fox

Each analyzer may also apply other transformations specific to its language in
order to make words from that(((“language analyzers”, “other transformations specific to the language”))) language more searchable:

• The english analyzer (((“english analyzer”)))removes the possessive 's:
  +
  John's -> john

• The french analyzer (((“french analyzer”)))removes elisions like l' and qu' and
  diacritics like ¨ or ^:
  +
  l'église -> eglis

• The german analyzer normalizes(((“german analyzer”))) terms, replacing ä and ae with a, or
  ß with ss, among others:
  +
  äußerst -> ausserst