diff --git a/docs/topics/index.rst b/docs/topics/index.rst
index e576ad56fa..5213486084 100644
--- a/docs/topics/index.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/index.rst
@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@ Introductions to all the key parts of Mayan EDMS you'll need to know:
    signatures
    ocr_backend
    indexes
+   languages
    smart_links
    tags
    mailing
diff --git a/docs/topics/languages.rst b/docs/topics/languages.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..277ed0a38a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/topics/languages.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+=========
+Languages
+=========
+
+The list of languages choices in the language dropdown used for documents is
+based on the current ISO 639 list. This list can be quite extensive. To reduce
+the number of languages available use the settings ``DOCUMENTS_LANGUAGE_CHOICES``,
+and set it to a nested list of abbreviations + languages names like::
+
+    DOCUMENTS_LANGUAGE_CHOICES = (('eng', 'English'), ('spa', 'Spanish'))
+
+
+The default language to appear on the dropdown can also be configured using::
+
+    DOCUMENTS_LANGUAGE = 'spa'
+
+Use the correct ISO 639-3 language abbreviation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639)
+as this code is used in several subsystems in Mayan EDMS such as the OCR app
+to determine how to interpret the document.