A website is available in 100 languages. There is a form to select a language, and it includes these 8
Normally, I would sort a list in alphabetical order. However, some of these languages aren't even written in the latin alphabet. I don't think you can sort items alphabetically if the items aren't even written in the same script.
How do you sort a list of languages?
There are several common options of sorting languages:
BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sort by English names, which looks outright strange (BBC):
Wikipedia sorts by latinized names. Android sorts by Unicode.
Since the hardest sorting is by latinized names, here's the properly sorted list:
However, I noticed that you have Mingrelian language and Bishnupriya, which are a minority languages and are strange to be included anywhere else other than Wikipedia. Also, the common name of Bishnupriya is Imar Thar, so when it's written properly should be placed before Hebrew when sorted by transliterated names.
By priority of usage based on your audience and the languages they speak. If its a US Site for English speakers, English should be first, etc.
Otherwise, potentially alphabetical by Nation (Americas, Asia, Europe..) and then languages within them, or write the language name in phonetic english and alphabetize with actual language in parentheses.
See Ikea, Nike or Jack Daniels for good examples.
I'm just going to take a wild stab here and ask - why not use the Accept-Language header that the browser sends you? In the worst case scenario, you'll show the same language of the browser being used. When I go to google, I don't select a language. It selects it for me.
From a purely technical level, yes, you can let the machine sort it -- if the strings are stored in a database system or even a text file, the table or the text file will be using the same character set. Let's say this this list is all unicode; if your base server locale is en, then I think (I just did a quick test) the unicode sort would come out to be:
But from a UX perspective, you want the sorting to make sense to your user and not to the machine, so you could approach it like Wikipedia and others do, and order by English transliteration while actually displaying the localized language name (e.g. Русский is alphabetized under "R"). I've not observed users working directly with a list quite as long as the 100 you have, but my gut tells me that's a little long to have users scan through to find their specific language when it's ordered in a potentially unfamiliar way. Breaking into regions could very well help with that.
Something I've done in the past and has worked well -- but requires additional translation work for more localized strings -- is to localize the language selection menu based on the locale being viewed.
Your English menu would show:
But when viewing the localized Russian site, the language menu would show:
Depending on who the site is for and how it will be used, it may be important that the languages are labelled both in the native script and in English (or other 'dominant' languages) so that speakers of the dominant language can refer people to the right script. This need became obvious to me during a project where help was being provided to minority-language speakers by people who didn't necessarily speak/read the minority language themselves.
In fact, this requirement also meant that the pages themselves were bilingual - but that's another story...
If there is enough room, you can group languages by alphabet type (latin, arabic, etc.).
In this way the user can ignore the groups of language names that “look like noise” to him and focus on few familiar groups. Alphabetical order can be preserved inside each group.
Do nots:
Do not sort using unicode as this will result in an order unnatural to the user. (Ordered by charset number and not by actual name if name is non-Latin, resulting in an order that appears random for non Latin languages which all appear at the end.)
I would not expect to find a language I speak using the English transliteration, especially since it can be transliterated differently into different spellings with very different place in list.
Dos:
Use the language names translated to the current language for sorting.
E.g. Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai.
Include the language's name localized into itself for the language in brackets after the translated name.
Do include default language(s) at top of the list (preferably duplicated in alphabetic place too).
If you automatically choose a default language according to location, provide a means of switching language for tourists that can't read the local language. (E.g. change to English by clicking on UK flag a top of page.)
1 country = 1 language.