diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 0f3376d..f6a6c1a 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 ## 0.5.1 [unreleased]
 
 - Replaced stop words with common terms query
+- Added language option
 - Fixed bug with empty array in where clause
 
 ## 0.5.0
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 8f69511..baf6e12 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -176,6 +176,18 @@ Available options are:
 :text_end
 ```
 
+### Language [master]
+
+Searchkick defaults to English for stemming.  To change this, use:
+
+```ruby
+class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
+  searchkick language: "German"
+end
+```
+
+[See the list of languages](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-snowball-tokenfilter.html)
+
 ### Synonyms
 
 ```ruby
diff --git a/lib/searchkick/reindex.rb b/lib/searchkick/reindex.rb
index e147528..687cac9 100644
--- a/lib/searchkick/reindex.rb
+++ b/lib/searchkick/reindex.rb
@@ -94,24 +94,24 @@ module Searchkick
               searchkick_keyword: {
                 type: "custom",
                 tokenizer: "keyword",
-                filter: ["lowercase", "snowball"]
+                filter: ["lowercase", "searchkick_stemmer"]
               },
               default_index: {
                 type: "custom",
                 tokenizer: "standard",
                 # synonym should come last, after stemming and shingle
-                # shingle must come before snowball
-                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "searchkick_index_shingle", "snowball"]
+                # shingle must come before searchkick_stemmer
+                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "searchkick_index_shingle", "searchkick_stemmer"]
               },
               searchkick_search: {
                 type: "custom",
                 tokenizer: "standard",
-                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "searchkick_search_shingle", "snowball"]
+                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "searchkick_search_shingle", "searchkick_stemmer"]
               },
               searchkick_search2: {
                 type: "custom",
                 tokenizer: "standard",
-                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "snowball"]
+                filter: ["standard", "lowercase", "asciifolding", "searchkick_stemmer"]
               },
               # https://github.com/leschenko/elasticsearch_autocomplete/blob/master/lib/elasticsearch_autocomplete/analyzers.rb
               searchkick_autocomplete_index: {
@@ -190,6 +190,10 @@ module Searchkick
                 type: "nGram",
                 min_gram: 1,
                 max_gram: 50
+              },
+              searchkick_stemmer: {
+                type: "snowball",
+                language: options[:language] || "English"
               }
             },
             tokenizer: {
--
libgit2 0.21.0