Ask HN: Why does YouTube make me scroll down to select English

4 points by msuniverse2026 37 days ago | 2 comments

Why is it when I'm selecting a subtitle language I have to scroll past Abhkazian, Afar, Akan, Afharic and all the other non-real languages to get to English? Wtf

Bender 37 days ago |

When you browse a site what Accept-Language header is your browser sending? [1] If sending en or en-US or en-GB then I don't know why they would not just that by default. If sending multiple languages then I guess they would have to offer the alphabetically sorted options. It's just a guess. They have never asked me to pick a language. All of the languages they offer are real languages. I would be impressed if they offered fictional or dead languages.

[1] - https://nochan.net/.env

gus_massa 37 days ago | |

I probably have es-ar or es as the main language, so my videos are autotranslated with a horrible robotic voice until I choose English. Then when I see a video in Spanish, it get autotranslated with a horrible robotic voice to English and I have to switch back.

I have set Spanish(LA), Spanish and English as main languages, but somehow my browser sends "es-419,es;q=0.9" and I see no "en" in the list.

The list of languages may have a short list of languages at the top. Wikipedia uses the most recent languages so it's easy to switch.