How to choose the right languages to prioritize when expanding globally

If you want to establish yourself as a global brand, you can’t just rely on English. While English is still the most common lingua franca, only 20% of the global population speaks it, and just 5% natively. Building multilingualism into your strategy is simply essential if your aim is to scale internationally.

You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t: 76% of consumers prefer purchasing products with information in their native language, and 40% will never buy from websites in other languages. The first step is to decide which languages to prioritize and how to do it. This requires a data-driven strategic framework. In this guide, we'll take you through the steps needed to develop it.

📍 Step 1: Identify target markets 🔗

Market selection is the compass that should guide your language strategy. Before evaluating languages, you need to define your global ambitions and pinpoint where to compete by analyzing four pillars: economic viability, cultural alignment, strategic fit, and regulatory complexity.

Economic viability 🔗

Economic indicators, such as GDP growth, disposable income, and digital adoption rates, highlight markets with scalable demand. Don’t just look at the present: think about the future as well. For example, if you’re in e-commerce, looking at where the market is growing fastest will help you identify more effective opportunities than just targeting the biggest market right now.

➡️ When you size up a new market, layer a few more leading indicators on top of GDP, disposable income, and digital‑adoption stats:

Weave two or three of these metrics into your decision framework and you’ll get a sharper, forward‑looking picture of where localization dollars will compound fastest, rather than just chasing the biggest GDP today.

📝 Pro tip: Check your own analytics first. If you’re already getting organic traffic and conversions from a country you’ve never targeted, that’s real‑world proof of demand. Layer the indicators above on that signal to confirm viability and size the upside.

Cultural alignment 🔗

Understanding whether there’s market for your product goes beyond just economic factors. Your product or services need to have a cultural fit with local behaviors. Walmart has struggled to expand into several countries due to a disconnect between how local consumers like to shop vs. Walmart’s big box style stores.

Understanding the local culture can be helped greatly by finding a partner in the local market, as you can use their existing knowledge and brand recognition to ensure you’re making the right moves when entering it.

Strategic fit 🔗

You need to ensure that you have the resources available to support an international expansion. You need to audit every department and aspect of your business. Is your marketing team ready to start campaigns focused on a new market? Are your customer service teams ready to provide support to a new market of customers who potentially speak a new language? Is your supply chain set up to service a new region?

One thing that will help guide how many resources you might need to assign for an expansion is understanding your competitor landscape. The more established competitors in your target international market, the more resources it will likely take to break into that market.

Make sure to have enough resources available to support your expansion plans. For that, you'll need to conduct a thorough business audit

Regulatory complexity 🔗

Understanding regional laws and regulations is essential in guiding your international expansion plans. For instance, if the fundamentals of your business don’t comply with GDPR, then expanding into the EU is going to be costly to make sure you’re compliant.

You’ll need to balance the costs complying with a region’s laws vs. their desirability as a market for your brand. A country could have a lot of consumers who fit your ideal customer profile, but if they have taxes that are unfavourable to foreign businesses, then there might not be enough ROI to justify expansion.

📊 Step 2: Gather data about language ROI 🔗

Not all languages offer equal returns. Prioritization requires balancing reach, revenue potential, and localization costs. Begin by mapping languages to your target markets and deciding which languages are likely to give you the broadest reach. 🔍

However, to really understand where the data is pointing for you before picking a language, you need to go deeper. Tapping into the Spanish market can have huge potential: it’s one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with over half a billion native speakers. Spanish can give you penetration in Spain, Latin America, and a large number of consumers in the USA (around 42 million Americans speak Spanish at home). But — which dialect should you choose? The Spanish of Spain (🇪🇸 Castilian Spanish) might be the original form, so that might make sense, but it has enough differences from Latin American variants that there could be issues connecting in those markets. Maybe, instead, you should localize into 🇲🇽 Mexican Spanish, which is by far the most spoken form of Spanish in the world.

When choosing the language that is likely to give you the broadest reach in a particular region, you need to consider the language habits and dialects preferred by your target customers

Being able to assess data like this is even more important when it comes to countries with high levels of multilingualism. 🇮🇳 India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, making it an attractive market for many companies looking to expand. However, with 22 official languages and over 1,500 dialects spoken, international brands can struggle to talk to consumers in their own language in India. The most obvious choice would be to focus on Hindi, as it’s not just the most spoken language in India, but also the third most spoken in the world. However, data has shown that non-native speakers of Hindi are becoming more resistant to having Hindi enforced on them, while Hindi speakers are more willing to shop on sites that are not in their native language. Plus, if your target audience in India is likely to speak English, it might be simpler and more cost-effective to use English localized for the Indian market.

How to divide potential languages into tiers 🔗

For a macro-perspective of choosing the languages, break them down into tiers:

• 🔑 Tier 1 (Core): Languages that are important for mature, sizeable markets. These could be languages that are relevant in countries that are likely to produce a high return on investment (such as German for the German market and Mandarin Chinese for the majority of China). They could also be languages that have a large amount of overlap, which could allow you to break into multiple markets (e.g., Portuguese for Portugal and Brazil).
• ✈️ Tier 2 (Emerging): These are high-growth markets where early entry secures you an advantage. For example, Vietnam has emerged as one of the leaders of Southeast Asia’s growing tech economy, making Vietnamese an interesting choice for expansion into that region.
• 🎯 Tier 3 (Strategic): critical under specific conditions. If your offering is inherently local or culture‑heavy —say, Catalan children’s books, Basque tourism experiences, or a Québec‑focused banking app— using the community’s own language isn’t optional; it’s a core value proposition that builds instant trust. Legal frameworks may also compel you to localize: Wales mandates Welsh for many public services, Canada’s charter extends to Inuktitut in northern territories, and app‑store guidelines increasingly require Indigenous‑language support. Even where regulation doesn’t force your hand, smaller‑language localization often sparks outsized goodwill; games translated into Māori or Welsh, for example, earn raving fans and word‑of‑mouth PR disproportionate to the audience size.

As a rule of thumb, invest in Tier 3 languages when the target audience is tightly defined and high‑value, compliance demands it, or the potential brand‑equity lift clearly outweighs the localization cost. Otherwise, concentrate early resources on Tier 1 and 2 languages, which typically deliver faster, broader ROI.

➡️ For in-depth guides on specific languages and markets, check out our collection of locale guides.

🗺️ Step 3: Map your localization rollout and resource plan 🔗

Once you have pinpointed the languages to prioritize and done your in-depth market and cultural research, you’re ready to start translating and localizing. 💪 But don’t try to do everything at once: taking a considered, strategic approach will make the process more efficient and effective.

Planning your strategy 🔗

Before you get to flashy marketing, you should start with the important customer touchpoints, like your product pages, checkout process, and support channels. This goes beyond just translating these pages into your desired language. Different regions and cultures can have different expectations over how these processes should work and the tone of voice you need, so make sure to take UX into account.

Once you have these core processes localized to a suitable standard, you can start thinking about your marketing and how your brand will be perceived in that location.This is something that can be greatly enhanced by the help of local experts who can understand the cultural implications of a translation.

What might seem innocuous or make sense from a straight-up one-to-one translation might have connotations you might miss without local expertise, no matter how good AI writing and translation has become. German start-up Kontool ran into trouble when launching in Indonesia due to the name’s resemblance to vulgar slang. Even bigger brands have had trouble: Pepsi declaring to Chinese customers that ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave’ rather than their intended slogan of ‘Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation’ is just scratching the surface.

Before you work on the flashy marketing, test the localized user experience in the chosen language. All the important touchpoints, like your product pages, checkout process, and support channels, should be aligned with the market's cultural expectations and habits

Resource allocation: What to budget besides translation fees 🔗

The amount of resources needed will be largely based on how different your target market’s language and culture is from your own. A European brand looking to expand into another European country will likely have enough shared cultural touchpoints that it could take minimal resources beyond translations. But that same company would likely need to invest more resources when looking to expand into an Asian market like China or Japan, due to how different the languages and cultures are from their own.

Automation can be a great help, especially with complex, time-consuming tasks. You might need local-cloud servers for compliance with data regulation laws like GDPR, making it important to manage tools like the cloud quickly and efficiently.

As the foundation for translation work and for automated localization workflows, Localazy centralizes the entire process through its integrated Translation Management System. Think of localization as a full project stack, not a line item for word count.

📋 As you scope a new market, run through this quick checklist to be sure every cost centre is covered:

A TMS like Localazy handles the core translation workflow (machine translation prefill, reviewer rounds, and continuous deployment), while the rows above ensure you also budget for infrastructure, people, QA, customer support, and go‑to‑market spend. Having this checklist in hand lets you forecast total localization cost of ownership, pick the right pilot market, and avoid nasty surprises mid‑rollout.

With Localazy taking care of the routine side of things, you can devote your resources more effectively, especially for engaging local experts when more culturally nuanced professional translations are needed.

📚 Related read: How Localazy CDN reduces Total Cost of Ownership (with examples)

Keep testing and reiterating 🔗

You’re probably already running A/B tests, gathering user feedback, and monitoring customer support with your original language. You need to do the same with the new languages you’ll be adding for global expansion. For that, you'll need systems and specialists who can understand the nuances of this feedback so you can make actionable changes.

You’ll also need to keep pace with how the cultural and linguistic landscape evolves. While not every language is changing as quickly as English, all languages do change over time. You need to keep pace with those changes, particularly if your target market skews younger, as younger people (especially women) drive linguistic change in most societies.

🚂 Boost your revenue with multilingualism 🔗

Expanding worldwide isn’t a sprint... it’s a flywheel you build and accelerate. Start by letting the numbers lead: stack market size, digital behavior, and competitive gaps to pick the languages that can unlock 80‑90 % of your addressable revenue. Next, resource the rollout beyond translation: budget for a TMS such as Localazy, region‑specific hosting, in‑locale support scripts, and a realistic QA schedule. Finally, treat localization as a living product feature: run ongoing A/B tests, refresh your glossary and style guide quarterly, and track ROI per language the same way you track traffic or CAC.

Ready to move? Sit down with your team this week, pull up your analytics, and run the quick viability checklist from Step 1. Pick one Tier 1 or Tier 2 language, drop those strings into a TMS, and schedule your first post‑launch review 30 days out. One language, one market, real revenue lift. Then, rinse and scale. Remember: localization isn’t a one-time project but an ongoing commitment.