The selection of country determines the market, which in turn determines the language presented to the user.
As far as I understand, markets are primarily defined by financial characteristics such as currency. (This understanding seems to be confirmed by the presence of currency after the country in the drop-down.) But in reality language is largely orthogonal to the market (or the country). In the very least we can observe that in the real world neither the market nor the country necessarily determines the language.
It is common on the web to conflate language and country, where the user must pick a country and then have the dominant language of that country used. But in this case the situation is even worse, where (for example) the entire European Union is using German.
It appears to be the case that this behavior is because I'm working with the example data installed at store creation, so I could make a new market for every separate country, but that still doesn't solve either problem:
- markets are not purely defined by financial considerations such as currency
- language is dependent on geography in a way that doesn't mirror the real world or the needs of real users
Describe the solution you'd like
I think the simplest solution would be to have a separate language picker. Once you choose your country, (which determines your currency) if you have not already manually selected a language then it could
- default to the most common language for the market but
- list all languages but put the languages associated with that market at the top of the list
Someone living in London who speaks Swahili should (if there's a Swahili translation) be able to choose Swahili. Someone living in the U.S. who speaks Spanish should be able to choose Spanish.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Creating a separate market for every country. This fails to solve the problems for the reasons described above.
The selection of country determines the market, which in turn determines the language presented to the user.
As far as I understand, markets are primarily defined by financial characteristics such as currency. (This understanding seems to be confirmed by the presence of currency after the country in the drop-down.) But in reality language is largely orthogonal to the market (or the country). In the very least we can observe that in the real world neither the market nor the country necessarily determines the language.
It is common on the web to conflate language and country, where the user must pick a country and then have the dominant language of that country used. But in this case the situation is even worse, where (for example) the entire European Union is using German.
It appears to be the case that this behavior is because I'm working with the example data installed at store creation, so I could make a new market for every separate country, but that still doesn't solve either problem:
Describe the solution you'd like
I think the simplest solution would be to have a separate language picker. Once you choose your country, (which determines your currency) if you have not already manually selected a language then it could
Someone living in London who speaks Swahili should (if there's a Swahili translation) be able to choose Swahili. Someone living in the U.S. who speaks Spanish should be able to choose Spanish.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Creating a separate market for every country. This fails to solve the problems for the reasons described above.