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While sniffing the headers of my browser, I see that my "Accept-Language" header contains en-US,en;q=0.5.

I understand the en-US, but what/where is the ,en; for/from? And the q=0.5? This header value is static across all websites and domains (as far as I can see).

(For reference, I'm investigating why a website continues to default my language to Chinese (on the site). My headers appear to be asking for English, my browser's locale is set to English, and I've never set any sort of language setting/preference to Chinese. I've cleared all cookies/cache, etc. My only guess is that I'm somehow being routed through a CDN that resides in a Chinese-speaking country, as I don't understand how else a website would/could make a language preference determination, since it's obviously not coming from my headers.)

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    I'm not posting this as an answer since it would essentially be a copy-paste of stackoverflow.com/questions/8552927
    – Karan
    Jul 1, 2013 at 18:12
  • Have you considered that the site just doesn't do content negotiation and is Chinese for everyone unless manually changed?
    – Daniel Beck
    Jul 1, 2013 at 18:14
  • I believe I had a Firefox addon that was causing this. When I manually monitored and "tampered" with the request headers to the site, I saw that my browser was requesting English, and that the site was returning English. But as soon as I browsed "normally" to the site, Chinese was back. After a couple times, the Chinese disappeared entirely, likely stemming from it being retrieved from browser cache. And the culprit (now gone), was likely an addon of either IP-lookup(s), or security related, like HTTPS Everywhere -- perhaps rerouting me through an IP address from another country. Jul 4, 2013 at 22:37

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This means the browser assigns en-US a quality of 1 and en a quality of 0.5, or in other words, this means "I prefer US English best, but otherwise, any English is fine".

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