diff --git a/whisper/decoding.py b/whisper/decoding.py
index 49485d009..5aa7f9df2 100644
--- a/whisper/decoding.py
+++ b/whisper/decoding.py
@@ -514,7 +514,7 @@ class DecodingTask:
     def __init__(self, model: "Whisper", options: DecodingOptions):
         self.model = model
 
-        language = options.language or "en"
+        language = options.language or "default"
         tokenizer = get_tokenizer(
             model.is_multilingual,
             num_languages=model.num_languages,
diff --git a/whisper/tokenizer.py b/whisper/tokenizer.py
index 2af837570..501b7a945 100644
--- a/whisper/tokenizer.py
+++ b/whisper/tokenizer.py
@@ -381,7 +381,7 @@ def get_tokenizer(
 
     if multilingual:
         encoding_name = "multilingual"
-        language = language or "en"
+        language = language or "default"
         task = task or "transcribe"
     else:
         encoding_name = "gpt2"