Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 15, 2017 22:04 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Web sites choosing language by bernat
Parent article: Highlights in Fedora 26

You are in country X, you get the official primary language of country X

Well, it can't be that simple, because a lot of countries, covering much of the planet, do not have an official primary language. The US has no official language; Canada has two, of equal status. And of course there is room for disagreement as to what is a country and probably as to what if anything is an official language of a country.

So if it's by country, someone had to sit down and assign one language to each country for web serving purposes, and I wonder why such person wouldn't use some more meaningful geography than country territories. Maybe there was already a table mapping IP address to country?

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 16, 2017 6:04 UTC (Sun) by bernat (subscriber, #51658) [Link] (1 responses)

In Switzerland, it's that simple. There are 4 official languages, German is the dominant one (60%) and everything just defaults to German. Even swiss websites just default to German. Google serves me ads only in German. Twitter serves me ads only in German. And I am not in the German-part of the country.

Web sites choosing language

Posted Jul 17, 2017 10:42 UTC (Mon) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link]

Being from the German speaking part, I do occasionally get ads in French and Italian on Youtube.