How to set your prefered language settings 

You should set the preferred language to all of the languages that you speak, in your order of preference. It is a good idea to add English ('en') as a backup (last in the list) because the original language of most web pages is English and not all documents may be available in your preferred language(s).

For example, if you are a native Xhosa speaker, you would want to set your language variable to include first the Xhosa language (with the language code 'xh'), followed by English (with the language code 'en').

See below for instructions on how to do this in various browsers.

As you can see there, most browsers will present you with some kind of user interface that will hide some of the details about defining your preferred language. If this isn't the case, please note one important simplification in the previous paragraph: if you're just specifying a list of languages like 'xh, en' this doesn't yet define a preference, but equally ranked options and the server may decide to ignore their ordering. If you want to specify real preference you have to use "quality values" which are floating point values between 0 and 1 where higher values indicate higher preference. So in the case above you would probably use something like 'xh; q=1.0, en; q=0.5'.

One thing you need to be careful of is using sub-categories of languages. Using 'en-GB, fr', for example, does not do what most people expect (if they have not read the HTTP specification).

We strongly recommend that you do not add country extensions to a language unless you have good reason. If you do add one, make sure you also include the language without the extension.

Explanation: A server that receives a request for a document with a preferred language of 'en-ZA, xh' will not serve the English ('en') version before the Xhosa version. It will only serve the English document before the French one if there is a version of the file with 'en-za' for the language extension.

Thus, you should configure your browser to send 'en-ZA, en, xh' or simply 'en, xh'. It does work the other way though, e.g. a server can return 'en-us' when 'en' is requested.

For more information about setting the preferred language variable see the Apache documentation on content negotiation.

Setting the preferred language in a browser

To set the default language in your browser you have to set a variable that gets passed to the web server. How this is done depends on the browser you are using.

Mozilla / Netscape 4.x and later versions

Edit -> Preferences -> Navigation -> Languages 

Note: with Netscape 4.x you need to make sure that you select the language from the available choices.  A number of people reported problems because they typed in the language by hand. 

Mozilla Firefox

Version 0.9 and newer:

Linux:

Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Languages

Windows: 

Tools -> Options -> General -> Languages 

Version 1.5 and newer:

Linux:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Edit Languages

Windows:

Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Edit Languages

In older versions you have to go to  about:config and change the value of intl.accept_languages.

Internet Explorer

Windows: 

Tools or View or Extras -> Internet Options -> (General) Languages

MacOS:

Edit -> Preferences -> Web Browser -> Language/Fonts

Pocket Internet Explorer 

Create the string registry key "AcceptLanguage" in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International\

with value "xh; q=1.0, en; q=0.6" (without quotes) 

Opera

Most versions:

File -> Preferences -> Languages

Linux/*BSD versions 5.x and 6.x:

File -> Preferences -> Document -> Languages

Galeon

Settings -> Preferences -> Rendering -> Languages

Konqueror

If you want to set only one language, it should be quite easy as soon as bug  #358459 is fixed, just select it in the KDE Control Centre and restart your KDE session in order to apply the changes.  If you want to have multiple languages set or you need a workaround for the above mentioned bug then you currently have to edit your ~/.kde/share/config/kio_httprc file to include a line like the following:

Language=xh;q=1.0, en;q=0.5 

Lynx

You can edit the preferred_language variable in your .lynxrc or set it using the 'O' command while in lymx