VS Code extension voice dictation ignores `language` setting — French audio is decoded as English gibberish

Summary

Voice dictation works correctly in the CLI with "language": "french" set in ~/.claude/settings.json — French speech is transcribed accurately.

However, the microphone button in the VS Code extension panel ignores this setting. When speaking French, the transcription engine decodes the audio as if it were English, producing nonsensical English text ("gibberish") that bears no relation to what was actually said.

Importantly, this is not a case of "French transcription returned in English translation" — it's the underlying speech model being run with the wrong language hint, so it tries to find English phonemes in French audio and outputs whatever it guesses.

Steps to reproduce

1. Configure ~/.claude/settings.json:

``json
{
"language": "french"
}
``

1. Open VS Code with the Claude Code extension panel
2. Click the microphone icon in the prompt box
3. Speak a French sentence, e.g. "Est-ce que tu comprends le français ?"
4. Observe the transcription inserted into the prompt

Expected behavior

Same behavior as CLI: French speech is transcribed as French text.

Actual behavior

The transcription is English-looking gibberish because the model is still using English as its target language.

Reverse test confirms the diagnosis:

• Speaking "Do you speak English?" → correctly transcribed as English text
• Speaking "Est-ce que tu comprends le français ?" → outputs garbled English approximation

So the audio pipeline works, the transcription service responds, but the language parameter from ~/.claude/settings.json is not propagated to the VS Code extension's microphone flow.

CLI comparison

Running claude in the VS Code integrated terminal with the exact same ~/.claude/settings.json and speaking the same French sentences → transcription in French is correct. So this is a bug specific to the extension's code path, not a general configuration issue.

Environment

• Claude Code VS Code extension version: 2.1.118
• VS Code version: 1.117.0
• OS: Windows 11
• Auth: Claude.ai account
• No ms-vscode.vscode-speech extension installed (confirmed — this is Claude Code's native voice dictation, not a third-party integration)
• ~/.claude/settings.json contains "language": "french"