Default language when user's language is not supported

My game has support for English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It automatically selects the language based on the iPhone’s global settings. What do you think I should do if the device is set to a language the game doesn’t support? I guess adding a language selection UI would be nice but how important is it really? Since I didn’t plan for this ahead of time it is unlikely to be added now. (the game is feature complete and almost done with beta). Currently it defaults to English if the user’s language isn’t supported. Would it make sense to have different defaults for different languages? For example, if the phone is set to Portuguese would I be better off showing Spanish or English?

That sounds like my game, minus the German (nothing against Germany; I just had to draw the line somewhere...).

I just went with English as a default. I figure that's widely-used enough that you have some chance to figure out how to manually change languages if needed. Interesting idea to try to choose a more similar language based on the devices settings, though.

--Eric

When in doubt, go with the lingua-franca. As long as you let users change it, they should be happy.

Which language is the lingua-franca? Well, since it means "language of the franks", obviously everyone wants to speak French. (I kid, I kid! )