Language switcher: visible, useful, and not evidence
A language switcher is the control a visitor clicks to change language. It is the most visible language feature on a site and the least useful as evidence, because what it lists cannot be compared between vendors without opening every entry. As of 2026-09-22.
| Property | Language switcher | Declared alternate |
|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | In the rendered page | In the markup |
| Countable the same way everywhere | No | Yes |
| Can list a page that does not exist | Yes | Yes |
| Can exist without the other | Yes | Yes |
Inclusion rule. The two places a site states its language versions, compared on whether a reader outside the company can count them consistently. Order. Fixed order, the visible element first.
1The visible one is the harder one to count
Switchers are built in every imaginable way: a dropdown, a footer row, a country flag grid, a modal, a separate page. Counting them across vendors means deciding what counts as one, and two careful people would disagree.
Declarations sit in one place with one shape. That is the entire reason this register counts those instead, and it is a decision about reproducibility rather than about which feature matters more to a user.
2A switcher can exist without a declaration
A site can serve six languages, offer a switcher for all six, and declare none of them. The count here would read empty, and the register says so: an empty cell means nothing was declared, not that nothing exists.
Three vendors in this register have empty site cells while publishing long output language lists. Whether any of them has a switcher is not what the column measures, and the column says as much on every page carrying it.
3What a switcher does tell a reader
It tells them what the company wants a visitor to see, which is a different and legitimate question. A flag grid aimed at consumers and a plain language list aimed at business buyers are two different positioning decisions.
For a buyer deciding whether to trust a claim, the useful move is to open the switcher and read the page behind it. That is what a spot check does, and it is the only way either signal turns into knowledge about a translation.
A definition, not a measurement: no vendor figure appears here that is not also in the register. Empty site cells beside long output lists are read on the vendor entries themselves.
Nearby terms: Language cluster, Machine-swapped page. The whole vocabulary is at terms; nothing on this page is a claim about a named product.