Why are the majority of web browsers in the UK asking for US English?

Question

According to my Google Analytics' statistics, nearly twice as many UK visitors ask for en-us rather than en-gb. Most browsers are supposed to set this based on the underlying OS defaults, so is this not working or do most people not bother to set the locale when they install their OS?

Incidentally this is a pain because we would like to infer their location from their language request and because British teachers hate it when you misspell "colour".

In case it is relevant:

• I'm assuming Google Analytics location is by IP address and is accurate (at least statistically)
• I'm assuming Google Analytics visitor language is the highest weighted entry in the Accept-Language HTTP header
• The majority of visitors are using Chrome or IE
• The majority of visitors are using Windows
• Nearly all the human visitors will be based in UK schools

Answer 1

I encountered this too and when I dug deeper and added Country as a secondary dimension I discovered that 72% of my en-us visitors ARE in the UK... only 11% are from the USA.

This suggests that those 72% have the wrong locale set on whatever device/PC/etc they are using to visit my site.

I suspect misconfigured home, corporate and internet cafe computers/devices may have something to do with this - when installing Windows you have to set the locale correctly in 3 different places and this is rarely done correctly.

In any case you should NOT infer location from language - though often correlated one does not imply the other and if you were to assume so many users could be inconvenienced.

Instead, either use IP lookup, HTML5 geolocation or request that the user selects their location - which should always be provided anyway (and prominently) to allow override in case one of the other methods results in an incorrect/inappropriate location.