2008/11/1 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Well, you may end up with a disproportionate representation of people speaking languages near the beginning of the alphabet.
Putting some countries first protects against such selection bias in common cases, though it could potentially introduce other biases (countries not in the top list may be underrepresented). The only way to truly protect against selection biases of any kind is to randomize the list, which obviously is much more cumbersome.
We'll have to see the actual data to assess how large these potential distortions might be. For example, if 95% of respondents completed the country/languages questions, then the selection bias of not finding your country is probably relatively small.