diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 4801f3014..b3e2dcfdf 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -13,6 +13,8 @@ New features
 * #668: Allow line numbering of ``code-block`` and ``literalinclude`` directives
   to start at an arbitrary line number, with a new ``lineno-start`` option.
 
+* Prompt for the document language in sphinx-quickstart.
+
 Bugs fixed
 ----------
 
diff --git a/sphinx/quickstart.py b/sphinx/quickstart.py
index f77e2f22b..ce18c0c10 100644
--- a/sphinx/quickstart.py
+++ b/sphinx/quickstart.py
@@ -99,7 +99,10 @@ release = '%(release_str)s'
 
 # The language for content autogenerated by Sphinx. Refer to documentation
 # for a list of supported languages.
-#language = None
+#
+# This is also used if you do content translation via gettext catalogs.
+# Usually you set "language" from the command line for these cases.
+language = %(language)r
 
 # There are two options for replacing |today|: either, you set today to some
 # non-false value, then it is used:
@@ -320,7 +323,7 @@ epub_copyright = u'%(copyright_str)s'
 #epub_theme = 'epub'
 
 # The language of the text. It defaults to the language option
-# or en if the language is not set.
+# or 'en' if the language is not set.
 #epub_language = ''
 
 # The scheme of the identifier. Typical schemes are ISBN or URL.
@@ -948,6 +951,7 @@ def ask_user(d):
     * author:    author names
     * version:   version of project
     * release:   release of project
+    * language:  document language
     * suffix:    source file suffix
     * master:    master document name
     * epub:      use epub (bool)
@@ -1014,6 +1018,18 @@ just set both to the same value.'''
     if 'release' not in d:
         do_prompt(d, 'release', 'Project release', d['version'])
 
+    if 'language' not in d:
+        print '''
+If the documents are to be written in a language other than English,
+you can select a language here by its language code. Sphinx will then
+translate text that it generates into that language.
+
+For a list of supported codes, see
+http://sphinx-doc.org/config.html#confval-language.'''
+        do_prompt(d, 'language', 'Project language', 'en')
+        if d['language'] == 'en':
+            d['language'] = None
+
     if 'suffix' not in d:
         print '''
 The file name suffix for source files. Commonly, this is either ".txt"
diff --git a/tests/test_quickstart.py b/tests/test_quickstart.py
index 9daa74011..7323f48e4 100644
--- a/tests/test_quickstart.py
+++ b/tests/test_quickstart.py
@@ -170,6 +170,7 @@ def test_quickstart_all_answers(tempdir):
         'Author name': u'Wolfgang Schäuble & G\'Beckstein'.encode('utf-8'),
         'Project version': '2.0',
         'Project release': '2.0.1',
+        'Project language': 'de',
         'Source file suffix': '.txt',
         'Name of your master document': 'contents',
         'autodoc': 'y',