How you can change your main LinkedIn profile language

And why you would do it.

Photo by Nicole Honeywill on Unsplash

UPDATE July 2023: Hey, after all this time, there’s some good news. Thanks to Jose Carlos’ comment, we now know that changing the primary language of the profile is as simple as selecting it from a dropdown menu! 🙌🏻

LinkedIn didn’t really promote the introduction of the feature, though. 😅

In the past days I decided to fix once and for all my LinkedIn main language to be English instead of the Italian that I chose as default language back in 2010 when I first signed in to LinkedIn.

To vanish your dreams I have to tell you that there is no way of keeping the profile as it is and just swap the main language, simply put: LinkedIn doesn’t allow it.

I don’t want to say a word against how badly that database must have been designed because this looks more like a management choice than a development limit. C’mon, it’s the user default language you already set up when it is first chosen! Anyway.

As a web developer I get a lot of attention from recruiters that contact me about opportunities from all from all over the world and, even if it makes no sense since they are doing it from LinkedIn, they often ask for a CV.

Why am I telling you this?

Well. These people find my profile and can understand it because they are logged in and they are surfing the platform having English as locale for their interface or at least they have the option to switch my profile language to its English version. Fine.

The gotcha is that I like to tell them to download my profile as PDF to avoid having to send them a CV when they don’t even tell me the name of the company they would like me to join and I am not yet sure they have a clear idea of what are the requirements for the job they are proposing or if I match them since they usually find me using just keywords. It would sound totally legit for them to download the PDF in the language they are using to read my profile, but it’s not working that way: the PDF is always downloaded in the main language of the profile, no matter what language you are reading that in.

Add to it that if your profile is public and visible from people that are not logged in it will always be shown in its default main language, and there is no way you can change it and keep your profile as it is at the same time.
I can’t tell it for sure because I couldn’t check the cached page, but this means that Google might be parsing your LinkedIn profile only in the default language it was originally created.

UPDATE

There is a more convenient way of achieving the same result in a less harmful way.

Better and easier way

After stressing out the customer support while doing the final merge (and after I was done writing this article) they finally sorted out an easier way to achieve the language change.

It’s best to do this from a desktop view as I’m not sure you see the same from mobile or tablet.

1. Backup all the text of your profile sections in all the languages, you might follow the instructions I gave below in this same article but just copy the texts somewhere (like on a text file, a note, a pastebin or whatever suits you better)
2. Delete any secondary language you added to your LinkedIn profile using the ✕ icon on the side in the list you see after clicking on the globe icon (something like 🌐) top right in your profile
3. Add the language that used to be primary language as second language and select English (or whatever you want to be your main language) when it asks what language is your existing profile written in.

This is the menu I’m mentioning in step 2

That’s it. You will just need to replace the text in the section with the appropriate language and you’ll be done. No endorsement or recommendation lost, as well as no need to create another profile. Profit!

I’m leaving the instructions for the hard way down here to let you know what I had to go through that might still be useful if for any reason the above solution didn’t work for you, or you can directly scroll down to the conclusions. You shouldn’t need to go through that process, tho.

NB: If you are having troubles completing step 2 make sure you follow these instructions

1. Temporarily save all information from your secondary language profiles to a different source.
2. Delete all your secondary language profiles.
3. Create a new secondary language profile in your primary language. For example, if your primary language is in English, create a new secondary profile in English.
   ** Note: This will prompt you to choose a different language for your primary profile.
4. Select your desired language for your primary profile from the Language of existing profile dropdown.
5. Fill the required information to complete the new secondary profile.
6. Create new secondary language profiles referring to the information you’ve saved in step

(from this Linkedin forum question)

So, let’s see what I actually went trough

The only way to change the main language of your LinkedIn profile seemed to be to create a new one, set it up with the language you want to be the new default and merge in the old profile into the new one as if it was a duplicate one.

By merging them, it will transfer all the connections from the old profile to the newly created, but you will loose everything else.

You need to copy over the new profile what you can recover, like your tagline, the About resume, your experiences, your skills(just the skills list), your spoken languages and your studies, various links, media and projects.

If you take this path, what you will loose and there’s no way to get back after the merge are:

• Your recommendations (given and received)
• Your endorsements
• All your articles and statuses
• All your messages
• Any LinkedIn unlocked feature, like the ability to publish articles (you will be limited to statuses that allow you up to 1300 characters)
• Your profile url will not be available from 180 days after deleting the old profile, so you’ll need to use a new one for at least 6 months

I have to admit you will easily feel like you were a zombie craving for brains, with the difference that you will be begging for endorsements and recommendations (at least those that you have lost), so ask yourself if you are ready before taking the decision. I’ve been waiting to see if they would have changed their plans and allowed the change for more than one year before going for the hard way.

Sign up for a new LinkedIn account

You will need a different email from the one you use in your current account, if you have more emails connected to it you can remove one of them from the account you already have and use it to register the new account.

I created my LinkedIn profile back in 2010, it was all but an easy choice to delete everything I have done since then only because they don’t allow the changing of the default language.

Copy the data over the new profile

Make sure to copy everything and end up having a 1-to-1 copy of everything you care about, don’t care about connections for now but make sure to also
follow all the companies and ask to join all the groups you where in.
The way I did it was to have two different browser windows, one on side of the other, one logged in with my old profile and the other with the one I just created.

Make a backup of the data of the old account

It is very important that you also request a full backup from your privacy settings, so that you will have at least a way to recover something you might have missed. Make sure to do it from the old profile.
You will receive a small version of the profile data almost immediately and you’ll have to wait (for me it took about one day) to get the complete export of all your history in LinkedIn. Just come back in a while in the same place where you requested the backup and check if the blue button stating Download archive.

Make yourself admin of things administrated by the old

If you have any company page, showcase page or group that you are administrating, make sure to make your new profile admin of those.
To do this you will need to send and approve a connection request from one profile to the other and link the pages and groups to your new profile.

I didn’t manage any group, so I will send you to the help article to add a group manager.
To add yourself as administrator of a page you can follow these steps:

1. Click on Me in the header section of your old profile (your profile photo on top right) to see if there is any company page in the dropdown. Click on its link
2. Click on the link Admin tools in the upper right section, then click on Page admins
3. Type in your name in the text field on the top of the section that pops up and select your new profile from the list

Make sure you do it for all of your pages.

You will end up seeing both your profiles in the list

Request the merge of the two profiles

If you are using the two factor authentication on your old profile, you will need to disable it before proceeding on this step. Please note that there is no coming back after this part, your old profile will be lost after merging, so please do your checks before going on.

At this point you should be ready to merge the accounts and transfer your connections from the old profile to the new one in the process.

To do the merge, head to Merging LinkedIn accounts section of your Account settings of the new profile. Funny they put merge-connections in the url, that’s what they actually do after all: they merge your connections and delete the incoming profile.

Fill in with your email and password you use to login into the old account and you should see something like the image below:

Confirmation screen after filling in with your email and password from the old account

There will be a couple of confirmation screens, make sure the bigger connections count is on the right after you click on Merge Accounts.

Make sure your old profile is the one that is being merged and closed.

And…done? Maybe. In my case I had to go through the customer service to be able to complete the process.
If it happens the same to you just contact them and ask them to merge the two profiles making sure to specify:

1. The primary email addresses registered for each account
2. Which of the two you want to keep as your LinkedIn account

You might have to ask the customer service to complete the merging operation on your behalf

Conclusions

I hope you found the article exhaustive and that it solved your problem. It is sad to have to deal with workarounds like these to handle problems that should not be a big deal in first place, but…meh.

I also hope LinkedIn will do something to simplify the process and allow us to focus on pushing our career instead of finding weird ways to have the tools to make people be able to read our LinkedIn profile the way we like them to do it.