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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

You can't use browser or OS settings are english as an indicator that people want english, because english is usually the default and a lot of people end up with english based computing without meaning to or without english literacy.

It would be different if there were a different accept-language set for user intentionally picked english vs default though. But approximately 3 people set the browser language settings ever; and nobody respects them so there's no incentive for anyone else to start, either.

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> approximately 3 people set the browser language settings ever

But I'd guess most people select their preferred language when initially setting up their device, which usually informs their browser language, no?

> and nobody respects them

In my experience, many most multilingual sites do respect them! (This sometimes throws me off when the non-English version of a site is automatically/badly translated and I have to manually switch to English, but I can see how it makes sense for most users.)

To make matters worse, it's not uncommon for the language to be hard coded via the OEM version of the OS.

This used to be true for Windows, but I don't think it is anymore. At least on the last version I used, I was able to change the UI language (but that was also marketed as an "Ultimate Edition perk" or something similar, so I'm not sure if OEM versions are still language-locked).

Where it probably gets tricky is for languages that operating systems are not commonly available in – users presumably have less of an incentive to set the correct locale if it does not make an immediate difference (assuming it is even offered in the setup dialog).

We run a high-traffic (millions per day) website and found that for certain cohorts, we saw up to 25% of users in Canada and Australia identifying themselves a "en-us" (English United States) from their default browser language... The number is shockingly high.

Why is it shocking? Those users presumably understand American English...

English hasn't been the default for OS or browsers since 1995.

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