Why is my Neovim not in English and how do I force it to be?

Question

I'm using Neovim 0.2.2 on macOS High Sierra (10.13.1), installed via brew install neovim.

I removed .config/nvim/init.vim.

Neovim starts up using German for interface labels, as shown here:

Here's the output of locale:

LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

Here are my "Language & Region" settings:

All my other applications, GUI or command line, are in English.

Can someone enlighten me on what is causing Neovim to display German interface labels and how I can override that to use English instead?

I searched the Neovim documentation and Google on how to manually set Neovim's interface language, but couldn't find anything.

Answer 1

Here is what you should do:

1. Open ~/.config/nvim/init.vim (or create it if not present)
2. Add a line language en_US
3. Save it and reload Neovim

I would like to give all the credits to @anothernode. I've just convert his comment into the regular answer.

Answer 2

Regarding the second part of my question: just after posting I had the ingenious idea of setting LANG=en_US and that actually works.

Just out of curiosity, I'd still be interested in the answer to the first part: where exactly did Neovim get the idea to use German instead of defaulting to English in the first place?