[NTG-context] language setting scope

Hello list, I'm typesetting XHTML italian text with Context (version 4/4/16). I've put a \language[it] just after \starttext, but I get words with a wrong hyphenation. As a patch, I just put \language[it] at the beginning of the xmlsetup that processes the <p> tag, and now words are hyphenated right, following the italian rules. It looks like \language[it] get reset at some point. Have you an explanation? Thank you in advance, Massi