Google Places Autocomplete returning non-English results-Collection of common programming errors

I am using the Google Places Autocomplete API to return location matches on a drop down search box.

We noticed recently that whilst searching for ‘Yorkshire’, the API is returning non-English results:

• Yorkshire du Nord
• Yorkshire De L’Ouest
• Yorkshire Del Sur

A quick search reveals this Stack thread, which strangely also concerns Yorkshire – Unexpected results – Google Autocomplete against yorkshire

However, I have tried everything in that thread, and the API is still returning these results. I am pretty sure language is not the problem in this case, as despite the region name being in French/Spanish, ‘United Kingdom’ is still returned in English. Our original API call did not specify any language=, but adding it with en or en-GB doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Our current query is here.

It almost seems as if the result being returned is just plain incorrect, but I find that hard to believe. Any ideas?