One of the use cases I wanted to support in OrganicYak was multi-lingual users: when we detect that a user speaks a both a language that your site is available in and one that isn’t, we could still show some text in their native language.

When your browser requests a webpage it sends an Accept-Language header which tells you which languages you’re able to accept content in, and it what order. Mine on this machine is:


ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-US,en;q=0.8,en-GB;q=0.6,fr-CA;q=0.4,fr;q=0.2


Namely that I’d prefer American English or just English, but I can read British English if you have it (q=0.8), if not give me Canadian French or just any French at all. The values are set automatically (in Chrome at least) from the language settings I have on my machine, a US keyboard but with English and French language settings. Honestly, how exactly this value gets set is a bit of mystery to me, since IE, Firefox and Safari seem to be only accepting English.

Google Analytics only tracks one language per visitor, but I can’t be the only one out there using the Accept-Language header the way it was intended. So as part of some work I’m doing on what % of people block ads, I recorded the full language string of all my visitors for a thousand visitors (this is a pretty small sample, so I wouldn’t call it statistically relevant, but I’ll try update it with more data in the future).

Roughly 3% of browsers in the wild advertise multiple languages.

This no doubt under-estimates how many visitors can read multiple languages, and my site is all in English which may depress these numbers, but ever since I became famous the traffic has come from all over the world. Really, the Accept-Languages header has never gotten the love it deserves, it’s hard to set and lots of sites ignore it (for instance, Canada Post will ask your language in a splash screen, even if your browser very clearly states you only speak one or the other official language).

For reference, here are the Accept-Languages strings I found from the first 1000 visitors:

• de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• de-DE,de;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
• en-gb,en-us;q=0.7,de-ch;q=0.3
• en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6
• en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6
• en-us, en;q=1.0,fr-ca, fr;q=0.5,pt-br, pt;q=0.5,es;q=0.5
• en-US,de-DE;q=0.5
• en-US,en;q=0.8,en-GB;q=0.6,fr-CA;q=0.4,fr;q=0.2
• en-us,en;q=0.8,es;q=0.5,es-mx;q=0.3
• en-US,en;q=0.8,es;q=0.6
• en-US,en;q=0.8,es-419;q=0.6
• en-US,en;q=0.8,pl;q=0.6
• en-US,en;q=0.8,pl;q=0.6
• en-US,en;q=0.9,fr;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,id;q=0.6
• en-US,en;q=0.9,ja;q=0.8,fr;q=0.7,de;q=0.6,es;q=0.5,it;q=0.4,nl;q=0.3,sv;q=0.2,nb;q=0.1
• es-es,es;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
• fr-FR,fr;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
• fr-FR,fr;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
• fr-FR,fr;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
• it-IT,it;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
• it-IT,it;q=0.9,en;q=0.8
• ja,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
• nl,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
• pl,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
• ru-RU,ru;q=0.9,en;q=0.8
• zh-tw,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3