diff --git a/paperless.conf.example b/paperless.conf.example
index 969666954..8b0e014c8 100644
--- a/paperless.conf.example
+++ b/paperless.conf.example
@@ -108,3 +108,7 @@ PAPERLESS_SHARED_SECRET=""
 # Customize number of list items to show per page
 #PAPERLESS_LIST_PER_PAGE=50
 
+# Customize the default language that tesseract will attempt to use when parsing
+# documents.  It should be a 3-letter language code consistent with ISO 639.
+#PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE=eng
+
diff --git a/src/paperless/settings.py b/src/paperless/settings.py
index 416513e57..d9352d7bb 100644
--- a/src/paperless/settings.py
+++ b/src/paperless/settings.py
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ LOGGING = {
 
 # The default language that tesseract will attempt to use when parsing
 # documents.  It should be a 3-letter language code consistent with ISO 639.
-OCR_LANGUAGE = "eng"
+OCR_LANGUAGE = os.getenv("PAPERLESS_OCR_LANGUAGE", "eng")
 
 # The amount of threads to use for OCR
 OCR_THREADS = os.getenv("PAPERLESS_OCR_THREADS")