Serve different files depending on the browser language

Assuming I have a file en/index.html and a file de/index.html I'd like to serve the de/index.html file to users who have German as their default language setup in their browser and to all others I'd like to serve the en/index.html file.

How can I do this within the means of the normal nginx configuration?

The easiest way to do this:

set $first_language $http_accept_language;
if ($http_accept_language ~* '^(.+?),') {
  set $first_language $1;
}

set $language_suffix 'en';
if ($first_language ~* 'de') {
  set $language_suffix 'de';
}

location / {
  try_files $uri/$language_suffix/index.html $uri $uri.html;
}

There's other way to do this but it has some drawbacks too:

map $http_accept_language $index_page {
    default /index.html;

    "~*^de" /index.de.html;
    "~*^fr" /index.fr.html;
}

Pros: no if's (if's are evil), less code.

Cons: map can only be used inside http { } block so regexp matching will happen for all sites, not just the current one.