Does Google Analytics track users with multiple languages?

Question

I'm assuming that when Google Analytics tracks a visitor's language it uses the Accept-language header from the request (most browser/OS combinations seem to populate it automatically).

My browser sends:

Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8,en-GB;q=0.6,fr-CA;q=0.4,fr;q=0.2

And yet I can't figure out how to get stats on what percentage of my visitors can speak a certain language even if it isn't their primary one (in my case I normally use English but I can use French). Does any analytics program do this, or am I going to have to capture it in my logs and track it manually?

Answer 1

Google Analytics claims to track the "preferred language [not languages] that visitors have configured on their computers."

This implies that they strip info after the first semicolon in the Accept-Language header. It's hard to tell from their documentation whether or not this is the case for sure, but you could test it by creating a secret page, adding analytics code, visiting it ten times yourself, and seeing which languages were reported under Visitors>Languages.

Competing services appear to take the same approach, so your options appear to be limited to using Google Analytics custom variables or Woopra Custom Visitor Data or a home-baked solution to manipulate and store the full Accept-Language header.