I can (and do) identify the country of origin of over 98% of the visitors to our web site using the maxmind database. But does that tell me what their native language is? No - it only gives me a clue.

A further clue is available from the accept-language header that's returned by browsers, and is available in PHP in the variable $_SERVER[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE]. With this variable, your web site can check if the user has expressed a language preference (and perhaps given a second and third choice too), and you can use the information to tailor your response as appropriate.

I've put up sample source code and a working demonstration on our web site. I've also added a page reporting language statistics for our own site ... only a very short data sample on there today, but as from tomoorow it will update daily with a 24 hour report.

Some surpises ... I would expect to find most major European countries choosing their own langauges, with Swiss visitors choosing between German, Italian and English. The first tests I ran, though, gave me a series of pages called up from the USA with a first choice language of Korean. Truly, the world is a global market.
(written 2006-06-18 07:17:31)

Commentator

says ...

Graham:

A few days "in" and I've been reviewing the statistics generated by this page from out site. Although 99% of UK visitors who express a preference expressed it for English, we've also had visits from the UK looking for pages in French, German, Greek, Chinese, Swedish, Dutch and Hungarian all in the last 24 hours. It's also very interesting to note the spread of language requests from countries such as Canada and Belgium where there are several official languages, and to see communities all around the world using the web to search for material in their own native language. (comment added 2006-06-21 06:55:39)

A211 - Web Application Design and Deployment
  [2072] Copyright, Portability and other nontechnical web site issues - (2009-03-09)
  [1798] What does an browser understand? What does an HTML document contain? - (2008-09-15)
  [1547] New bathing idea for hotels from Hotelympia - (2008-02-20)
  [1545] Letting new visitors know we provide training courses - (2008-02-19)
  [1351] Compressing web pages sent out from server. Is it worth it? - (2007-09-14)
  [1256] What country are you in? How we find out on our web site - (2007-07-03)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [659] Web Application Components - (2006-03-28)
  [443] Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser - (2005-09-12)
  [356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)

G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility
  [2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
  [2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
  [2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
  [2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
  [2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
  [2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielillä - (2009-08-09)
  [2340] ldning, Open Source dator språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2339] Opplæring, Open Source datamaskinen språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
  [2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
  [2336] Formação, Open Source computador línguas - (2009-08-09)
  [2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
  [2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
  [2333] Formación, de los lenguajes de código abierto - (2009-08-09)
  [2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
  [2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
  [2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
  [2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
  [1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
  [1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
  [1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
  [1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
  [1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
  [1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
  [1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
  [1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
  [1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
  [1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
  [1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
  [1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
  [1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
  [1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
  [1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
  [1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
  [1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
  [1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
  [1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
  [1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
  [1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
  [1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
  [1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
  [994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
  [976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
  [916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
  [893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
  [800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
  [757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
  [732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
  [718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
  [681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
  [658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
  [649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
  [533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
  [492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
  [414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
  [348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
  [288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
  [284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
  [278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
  [202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
  [197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
  [182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
  [179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
  [173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
  [165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
  [117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
  [109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
  [98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
  [32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)

H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling
  [2679] How to build a test harness into your PHP - (2010-03-16)
  [2632] Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP - (2010-02-12)
  [1549] http, https and ajp - comparison and choice - (2008-02-22)
  [1518] Downloading data for use in Excel (from PHP / MySQL) - (2008-01-25)
  [1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
  [1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
  [1495] Single login and single threaded models - Java and PHP - (2008-01-04)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1379] Simple page password protection - PHP - (2007-10-04)
  [1355] .php or .html extension? Morally Static Pages - (2007-09-17)
  [1210] PHP header() function - uses and new restrictions - (2007-05-30)
  [1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
  [1009] Passing GET parameters through Apache mod_rewrite - (2006-12-27)
  [936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [847] Image maps for navigation - a straightforward example - (2006-08-28)
  [789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
  [675] Adding PHP tags to an old cgi program - (2006-04-08)
  [603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
  [565] Using PHP to output images, XML, Style sheets, etc - (2006-01-15)
  [542] Morning image, afternoon image - (2005-12-26)
  [537] Daily Image Santafied - (2005-12-22)
  [484] Setting the file name for a downloaded document - (2005-11-03)
  [451] Accessing a page via POST from within a PHP script - (2005-09-26)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
  [220] When to use Frames - (2005-02-19)

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Journey planning - Xephos v Transport Direct
Much more that the world cup
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