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Which provides better UX for a dropdown displaying user language options?
such that they translate
Natural language. If I can't read English, I also can't read "Spanish" in English.
Ordering depends on context. Some sites have a landing page with regional links, then it would make sense to copy those categories. Alphabetical is a good default. Most default/recent are likely too complex to be interpreted for what they are if the list is long and provide little benefit if you don't have to scroll.
Potentially have 1 or 2 'official' languages pinned to the top if you have many options. So for a chinese factory: Chinese, English | Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese.
If you have different categories always indicate separation with something like a horizontal rule!
