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I disagree with the first part, flags English (UK), Spanish (Spain), etc. are actually really helpful when there's more than 2-3 languages. Saying English is fr

I disagree with the first part, flags English (UK), Spanish (Spain), etc. are actually really helpful when there's more than 2-3 languages. Saying English is from England/UK is as offensive as calling it "Engl-ish", a non-issue AFAIK. That said, your second part of Welsh is totally right, Spanish should be "Español" and not "Española" (since "lenguaje" in Spanish is male), and def Basque should not have the Spanish flag, and Catalan should not have the Andorra flag (even if it's the only country that has it as the official language), instead they should have their local Basque Country and Catalonian flags: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basques#Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basques#Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia

j_french 4y ago
The UK flag can be a somewhat loaded symbol for native English speakers from England's former colonies (like Ireland, where I'm from). I'd rather not have to use it to select my language preference, but I'm not going to waste energy jumping up and down shouting on the internet about it either. A minor annoyance I guess.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- biorach 4y ago
  Also Irish, agree 100%. Every time I have to click on the UK flag to select my language preference I have a quiet "ugh" moment, then click on the damn flag and move on with my life.
  - graderjs 4y ago
    Agree this is a strange oversight of i18n language selection UI in general. We have English ({US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom}) as relatively standard language choices why not add Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. I think there's probably even more... We also have Chinese ({Hong Kong, China, Taiwan}) as fairly standard choices for somewhat similar reasons. I think country variations for Arabic also exist. The lack of completeness in general (not this site specifically) is inexcusable.
- veltas 4y ago
  Yeah as I said the best thing is to remove the flag, because languages aren't flags. As someone else said, just put the language name in its own language. I'm not jumping up and down annoyed, I'm not even really annoyed, I just wanted to share this cultural insight that IMO was indicative of a larger issue of having flags at all.
  - shirdel87 4y ago
    We do respect to the cultures. The guys here are right about not using flags.
mattmanser 4y ago
Saying English is from England/UK is as offensive as calling it "Engl-ish", a non-issue AFAIK. Huh? English is from England.
- franciscop 4y ago
  That's what I meant, sorry if I didn't explain it properly. If someone is offended by the UK flag, why/shouldn't they be the same offended if you call the language English? Like, the language denotes the country of origin, and the flag denotes the country of origin of the language, nothing more nothing less.
  - mattmanser 4y ago
    I see what you mean. I think it's a bit more loaded than you realize when you start putting flags next to it.
  - veltas 4y ago
    It's confusing because I was talking about English having an American flag.
chrismorgan 4y ago
Flags are problematic and just shouldn’t be used to represent languages, ever. Fortunately, there’s a uniformly superior alternative: the name of the language, in itself rather than English. On average, people will recognise their language name faster than their flag, in part because that’s the way the mind works and in part because so many flags are so similar. Speaking more generally, icons perform surprisingly badly, given how widely they’re used: among even basically literate people, text without icon practically always outperforms icon without text. (Perhaps surprisingly, even among illiterate people text tends to perform quite well, once they know what the corresponding function is. Icons are often lousy enough that both of these often devolve to memorisation and pattern matching, and words often have more varying shapes, which make them easier to remember.) The real problem on this site is that its language selector dropdown is very poor: it’s unreasonably tiny, showing only 6 items at a time, out of its 99, with a lot of scrolling and even lazy rendering of those scrolling options, and the first 18 items are in no particular order, before the remainder are mostly in English name alphabetical order (though there are several that look to be out of order and/or mislabelled, e.g. Kannada is labelled Javanese, and Kanuri Kinyarwanda); and that it’s searchable by typing may not be obvious, and functionally broken in only matching the string displayed (e.g. “বাংলা” but not “Bengali” or ideally also “bn” and “ben” for the ISO 639 codes). It should instead show all of the options at once in a two-dimensional grid on larger displays, and have a little scrolling on mobile platforms, but certainly no fewer than 24 options visible at once on even comparatively small devices. It’s a case of using the wrong widget for the job. Just because it’s readily available doesn’t mean you should use it.
- shirdel87 4y ago
  What a comprehensive comment. Thanks for sharing your feedback. Same page, we will be improving the structure as well as design of this crucial section. I think the best is getting feedback from local merchants specially when it comes to the businesses daily usages.
veltas 4y ago
I'm not saying they should say English is from the UK, although as a matter of fact it is, and I don't know why that would offend anyone. I'm not offended either way. I'm just identifying a cultural issue they've overlooked. Your suggestion is to ignore it, that's fine but the problem still exists. You can't please everyone.
ranger_danger 4y ago
http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/
- shirdel87 4y ago
  Thanks for providing the link.
- shirdel87 4y ago
  I love the design recommended on this page. Straightforward and intuitive!
- franciscop 4y ago
  In some languages like Japanese they literally are, the name of the language is said as the name of the country + 語 (language), so Spanish is スペイン語, or "Spain Language" so to speak.

j_french 4y ago

The UK flag can be a somewhat loaded symbol for native English speakers from England's former colonies (like Ireland, where I'm from). I'd rather not have to use it to select my language preference, but I'm not going to waste energy jumping up and down shouting on the internet about it either. A minor annoyance I guess.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
biorach 4y ago
Also Irish, agree 100%. Every time I have to click on the UK flag to select my language preference I have a quiet "ugh" moment, then click on the damn flag and move on with my life.
- graderjs 4y ago
  Agree this is a strange oversight of i18n language selection UI in general. We have English ({US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom}) as relatively standard language choices why not add Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. I think there's probably even more... We also have Chinese ({Hong Kong, China, Taiwan}) as fairly standard choices for somewhat similar reasons. I think country variations for Arabic also exist. The lack of completeness in general (not this site specifically) is inexcusable.
veltas 4y ago
Yeah as I said the best thing is to remove the flag, because languages aren't flags. As someone else said, just put the language name in its own language. I'm not jumping up and down annoyed, I'm not even really annoyed, I just wanted to share this cultural insight that IMO was indicative of a larger issue of having flags at all.
- shirdel87 4y ago
  We do respect to the cultures. The guys here are right about not using flags.

mattmanser 4y ago

Saying English is from England/UK is as offensive as calling it "Engl-ish", a non-issue AFAIK. Huh? English is from England.

franciscop 4y ago
That's what I meant, sorry if I didn't explain it properly. If someone is offended by the UK flag, why/shouldn't they be the same offended if you call the language English? Like, the language denotes the country of origin, and the flag denotes the country of origin of the language, nothing more nothing less.
- mattmanser 4y ago
  I see what you mean. I think it's a bit more loaded than you realize when you start putting flags next to it.
- veltas 4y ago
  It's confusing because I was talking about English having an American flag.

chrismorgan 4y ago

Flags are problematic and just shouldn’t be used to represent languages, ever. Fortunately, there’s a uniformly superior alternative: the name of the language, in itself rather than English. On average, people will recognise their language name faster than their flag, in part because that’s the way the mind works and in part because so many flags are so similar. Speaking more generally, icons perform surprisingly badly, given how widely they’re used: among even basically literate people, text without icon practically always outperforms icon without text. (Perhaps surprisingly, even among illiterate people text tends to perform quite well, once they know what the corresponding function is. Icons are often lousy enough that both of these often devolve to memorisation and pattern matching, and words often have more varying shapes, which make them easier to remember.) The real problem on this site is that its language selector dropdown is very poor: it’s unreasonably tiny, showing only 6 items at a time, out of its 99, with a lot of scrolling and even lazy rendering of those scrolling options, and the first 18 items are in no particular order, before the remainder are mostly in English name alphabetical order (though there are several that look to be out of order and/or mislabelled, e.g. Kannada is labelled Javanese, and Kanuri Kinyarwanda); and that it’s searchable by typing may not be obvious, and functionally broken in only matching the string displayed (e.g. “বাংলা” but not “Bengali” or ideally also “bn” and “ben” for the ISO 639 codes). It should instead show all of the options at once in a two-dimensional grid on larger displays, and have a little scrolling on mobile platforms, but certainly no fewer than 24 options visible at once on even comparatively small devices. It’s a case of using the wrong widget for the job. Just because it’s readily available doesn’t mean you should use it.

shirdel87 4y ago
What a comprehensive comment. Thanks for sharing your feedback. Same page, we will be improving the structure as well as design of this crucial section. I think the best is getting feedback from local merchants specially when it comes to the businesses daily usages.

veltas 4y ago

I'm not saying they should say English is from the UK, although as a matter of fact it is, and I don't know why that would offend anyone. I'm not offended either way. I'm just identifying a cultural issue they've overlooked. Your suggestion is to ignore it, that's fine but the problem still exists. You can't please everyone.

ranger_danger 4y ago

http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/ http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/

shirdel87 4y ago
Thanks for providing the link.
shirdel87 4y ago
I love the design recommended on this page. Straightforward and intuitive!
franciscop 4y ago
In some languages like Japanese they literally are, the name of the language is said as the name of the country + 語 (language), so Spanish is スペイン語, or "Spain Language" so to speak.