Emoji picker doesn't use the correct language

Hello! Thank you for reaching out. I understand that you are experiencing an issue with the emoji picker in Windows 11. I'll do my best to assist you with this.

Regarding your concern, the language used in the emoji picker is based on the language settings of your keyboard. If your keyboard is set to AZERTY with French as the language, then the emoji picker will display the French names of the emojis.

To change the language used in the emoji picker, you can try changing the language settings of your keyboard. Here's how:

1. Go to Settings > Time & Language > Language.

2. Under Preferred languages, click on the language you want to use for the emoji picker.

3. Click on Options.

4. Under Keyboards, click on Add a keyboard.

5. Select the keyboard layout you want to use (in your case, AZERTY).

6. Remove any other keyboard layouts that you don't need.

7. Restart your computer.

After following these steps, the emoji picker should display the English names of the emojis. I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

I did that and it doesn't change anything, the picker remains in the wrong language

I was able to solve this with one additional step after the reboot - you need to switch keyboards in the taskbar (bottom right). In my case it still showed "DEU" for German and I had to switch it to "ENG" for English. This immediately switches the Emoji search over.

Note: I have Windows in English but my keyboard layout is German. The reason the Emoji search was in German appears to be that my keyboard layout (QWERZ) was assigned to the German language under "Time & language" -> "Language & region" -> Options. I was unable to unassign it so I just assigned QWERZ to my English language and rebooted.