Mother Tongue & Nationality

People work in their own language and by their own conventions. An agent can too. Give it a mother tongue and a nationality, and it thinks the way someone from there would — dates, money, names and formality read as normal to it — while always answering people in the language they wrote in.

Configuration

agents:
  collections_agent:
    name: collections_agent
    agent_type: llm
    model: claude-sonnet-4-6
    mother_tongue: Hindi
    nationality: Indian

The Manager and Summarizer take theirs from the manager block:

manager:
  mother_tongue: Japanese
  nationality: Japanese

Both fields are optional and free text, up to 40 characters. Leave them out and the agent behaves exactly as before. They apply to LLM agents only.

What changes

The agent reasons and phrases in its mother tongue.
It treats its nationality's conventions — how dates are written, how money is expressed, how people are addressed, how formal to be — as the normal ones.
It always replies in the language the person used. A Hindi-speaking agent answering an English email answers in English.

When to use it

A team that serves one region, where local conventions matter more than translation.
An agent standing in for a person, so it works the way that person did.
A mesh whose own staff read its reasoning in their language.

Next Steps

LLM Agents
Agent Experience

LeafMesh — agents that work the way your people do