I think the whole point is for it to be a static site that is easily distributed with little-to-no overhead, as it probably receives a non-trivial amount of traffic.

Yep, that's exactly their reasoning:

> As it tends to be heavily trafficked, the overall bandwidth is a key consideration

Then they should have just kept it english only without any script.

This feels like a “falsehood developers think about localization.”

It’s always funny when I get French YouTube ads. As if YouTube is desperately trying to offload the adbuys anywhere they can by pretending that Canada must mean French.

Do you have ca-fr (or whatever) in your accept language header?

I want to read content only in a specific language. This is different language than the language of the country I live in. I have my operating system, my keyboard layout, my browser, my accept languages header, everything configured to the language I want.

And get I often get websites and ads in the language of the country my IP points to

Google famously think they know better than you what languages you want.

I hate this with a passion. Google is very guilty of this. Their AI summary very often insists on replying in the (IP) local language, nevermind the language of my HTTP headers, Google profile, or the actual natural language request...

Just check the Accept-Language header

I believe it's just using the official languages of the UN

Interesting, didn’t know that. Also I would have expected German and Hindi to be official UN languages given the number of native speakers in the world

Guess most of German speaking and Hindi speaking also know English.

That assumes that (i) every region has a primary language, and (ii) everyone in that region speaks that language, both of which are false.

(And false often enough that guessing language based on IP address works badly in practice, I hear.)