My problem was not related to \language or \mainlanguage.
It was the side-effect of a different mistake: \startnotmode
that was not closed by a \stopnotmode.
...
\startmode[Info]
... % things to do when mode Info is active
\stopmode
\startnotmode[Info]
... % things to do when mode Info is not active
\stopmode % <-- THE BUG: should be \stopnotmode
...
\mainlanguage[it] % without the right \stopnotmode this statement works only
when mode Info is not active
...
I just copied and pasted \startmode[Info] ... \stopmode changing only
\startmode into \startnotmode, but not \stopmode into \stopnotmode.
context did not complain for that mismatch,
but --mode=Info made the \mainlanguage[it] ignored,
because \startnotmode[Info] was not closed.
Everything else seemed to work just fine, and the missing
italian hyphenation looked like a mistery.
Before that I used \doifmode{Info}{ ... } and \doifnotmode{Info}{ ... }:
they are less readable but more robust, since a missing brace gets
detected by context.
> I apologize for the noise.
> \mainlanguage[it] before \starttext solves the problem.
>
> > 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?
> >
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