Hi everyone,
we’ve long supported requesting geocoding results in different languages (I mean human languages, not programming language - we of course also support querying our service via many different programming languages and have
SDKs for most programming languages), via the optional language parameter.
But what if you don’t know which language they speak locally? In that case you can now specify language=native and we will attempt to return results in
the local language. I intentionally write “attempt to” because language is
a complicated thing. Some countries have more than one official language. In
other places the official language may not be the one actually used day to day.
I experience this every day living in Barcelona where Spanish and Catalan
co-exist. So it’s not always so clear what the “native” language is, and
users of this parameter value need to understand it may break their assumptions.
For this reason you should read the
language section of our API docs,
where we explain some common issues, before using this new value.
Finally, and as always, we are only as good as the underlying datasets we
have available to us.
Nevertheless, we hope this helps solve a common challenge some users have
faced. Many thanks to those who suggested it, please keep the suggestions
coming.
Happy geocoding,
written in España