Localization in the web context is hard, I know. To make things easier, it may seem like a good idea to use GeoIP to detect what country an IP is coming from and default your localization based on that. While I disagree with that premise, this blog post isn't about that.

Instead, it's about the fact that most of you get something wrong about this little country. I know, I know. If you're not from here, it's difficult to understand. But please get this through your head: Belgium is not a French-speaking country.

That is, not entirely. Yes, there is a large group of French-speaking people who live here. Mostly in the south. But if you check the numbers, you'll find that there are, in fact, more people in Belgium who speak Dutch rather than French. Not by a very wide margin, mind you, but still by a wide enough margin to be significant. Wikipedia claims the split is 59%/41% Dutch/French; I don't know how accurate those numbers are, but they don't seem too wrong.

So please, pretty please, with sugar on top: next time you're going to do a localized website, don't assume my French is better than my English. And if you (incorrectly) do, then at the very least make it painfully obvious to me where the "switch the interface to a different language" option in your website is. Because while it's annoying to be greeted in a language that I'm not very good at, it's even more annoying to not be able to find out how to get the correctly-localized version.

Thanks.