The package manages culturally-determined typographical (and other) rules, and hyphenation patterns for a wide range of languages. A document may select a single language to be supported, or it may select several, in which case the document may switch from one language to another in a variety of ways. Babel uses contributed configuration files that provide the detail of what has to be done for each language. Users of XeTeX are advised to use the polyglossia package rather than Babel.