How to free up some had drive space on your Mac with Monolingual
April 21, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania
Monolingual is a free program that does a great job of freeing up disk space on your Mac. Using Monolingual you can remove all the support files of all the extra languages that your Mac supports when shipped. This can total up to hundreds of megabytes of data. Chances are that you will never use Klingon or Esperanto on your computer. Why not get rid of it and use it to store some more music or videos?
Head over the project’s website and download the latest release of the application. It’s a free download, and only about 1.4 MB in size. Once the download is done the installer should mount automatically and display a window like the one below. Drag and drop the Monolingual application icon into the Applications folder next to it.
To launch the application double click on the Monolingual icon in the Applications folder. You will be welcomed by a list of languages currently available on your Mac. Check whatever languages you don’t want. Might be a good idea to leave one or two languages that you think you might just need sometime unchecked. Once you are done selecting the languages you want deleted form your computer hit the Remove button. You will be asked if you are sure you want to go ahead and remove these languages. hit Continue if you are certain you want to go ahead. The only way you can get back the languages that are removed by Monolingual is by reinstalling your MacOS.
Once Monolingual is done running you can exit it. You just got back some valuable disk space on your Mac. However, use this application with care. I would strongly advise that you take a complete backup of your computer when removing the extra language support files using Monolingual.
Note from Ross: I would strongly advise against using Monolingual for ‘cleaning’ Architectures (from the Architectures tab). I’ve read too many horror stories about the results of that particular feature. As far as using Monolingual to clear out languages you’ll never need/use - that’s safe - but as Sukrit mentioned, make sure you do have a complete backup before you do that, because the only way to get the languages back is to re-install OS X.
One thing to remember with Monolingual - If you run Microsoft Office for Mac, you will no longer be able to check for updates inside Office. The update engine inside Office looks for a few of the files that Monolingual removes and this borks it.