You can choose your preferred language in your browser's settings. You can even choose multiple languages. These settings are used by many websites to automatically display webpages in your preferred languages. This site, for instance, looks to welcome visitors in any of over 100 languages.

One of the reasons for this is that, of those people who speak English, only one quarter of them do so as first language. That three quarters of those who speak English understand other languages better, is increasing leading to websites providing content in multiple languages.

You can see below how to set your browsers language in Firefox, IE, Opera and Netscape. You can expect other browsers will have similar settings avaliable.

If your prefered language isn't on the list you can still add it in Internet Explorer & Opera browsers as used-defined. Simply enter the ISO639-1 two letter code that represents the language.

Dialects can be defined 'xx-yy', the 'xx' is the ISO639-1 code; the 'yy' is the ISO3166-1-alpha-2 country code.

The ISO639-1 language code list can be found here.
The ISO3166-1-alpha-2 country code list can be found here.

Firefox

  1. Select menu [Tools]
  2. Select menu item [Options].
  3. Select tab [General].
  4. Click button [Languages].
  5. Click drop-down-box [Select a language to add..]
  6. Mark a language e.g. English (United Kingdom) and click [Add].
  7. Use button [Move Up], to place your language at the top of the list.
  8. Click [OK] twice.
  9. Reload webpage (e.g. by [F5]).

Internet Explorer

  1. Select menu [Tools]
  2. Select menu item [Internet Options].
  3. Select tab [General].
  4. Click button [Languages].
  5. Click button [Add...]
  6. Mark a language e.g. English (United Kingdom) and click [OK].
  7. Use button [Move Up], to place your language at the top of the list.
  8. Click [OK] twice.
  9. Reload webpage (e.g. by [F5]).

Opera

  1. Select menu [File]
  2. Select menu item [Preferences...].
  3. Select category [Languages].
  4. Click button [Add...]
  5. Mark a language e.g. English (United Kingdom) and click [OK].
  6. Use button [Move up] to place your language at the top of the list.
  7. Click [OK] twice.
  8. Reload webpage (e.g. by [F5]).

Netscape Navigator 4.x

  1. Select menu [Edit]
  2. Select menu item [Settings].
  3. Select category [Navigator/Languages].
  4. Click button [Add...]
  5. Mark a language e.g. English (United Kingdom) and click [OK].
  6. Use arrow button to place your language at the top of the list.
  7. Click [OK]
  8. Reload webpage (e.g. by [Ctrl+R]).