How To Remove Langauge Packs From iPhone

All credit for the following 'hack' goes to "JM" at a-common-hades.blogspot.com.

I followed his tutorial but had some hangups that I figured others with firmware 4.3.3 might have. So I decided to post a slightly revised tutorial here. I used the "stripped down" version because I just wanted to quickly delete all languages but English.

View either this link (full script) or this link (stripped down) from your iPhones web browser. Copy the entire code found on either page using the iPhones copy/paste feature, starting from "#! /bin/sh" and ending with "# end of script".

Open iFile and navigate to this folder /private/var/mobile and click "Edit" then + at the bottom left of your screen. Type the name "langpack2.sh", change its "Attributes" to "Regular File" and then click "Create". Now click "Done" and then click on the file you just created, open with "Text Viewer", click "Edit" then paste the code from above into it. Click "Done" and close iFile, you're done with it.

Open MobileTerminal and type the following exactly: (skip this part if you're already changed your root passwords)

su root

It will ask you for a password. The default password from Apple is "alpine" (without quotes). Then type:

passwd

It will ask you to set a new password. Make very sure you type exactly what you want your new password to be. Terminal does not display what you're typing for passwords (they call it a security measure). It will ask you to type the password again to verify you got it right. Then type:

passwd mobile

Again it will ask you for a new password and then to verify it. You can choose to have the same password for both, it doesn't matter. What you're doing making sure that no one else can access your phones files from the internet by using the default password "alpine", which everyone knows about.

Once that's complete, you'll be logged into the ROOT account. Now we can start removing the language packs. Type this exactly:

cd /private/var/mobile

then this:

chmod 755 langpack2.sh

then this:

./langpack2.sh

If everything to this point has worked correctly, you should be prompted to answer "y" or "n" to deleting all languages except English/Japanese. Just hit the y on your keyboard and click return. The process takes a little while, ~2.5 minutes for me so be patient. It will notify when its completed and how many languages were removed. You can check to make sure this worked by going to your iPhones settings menu like so: settings -> general -> international -> language. There should now only be English, Japanese (symbols), and British English.

I don't see an improvement in available RAM, though I'm not surprised by this. I don't really see any 'performance' enhancement at all. But, I also don't see why the space taken up with these useless files is necessary and its always fun to learn how to delete things that Apple doesn't want to let you by default.