14 ms·

Flags Are Not Languages

109 points by edward 2y ago

James_K 2y ago
Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.
- davedx 2y ago
  Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple. Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.
  - kapep 2y ago
    Every unicode emoji has an offical short description. As far as I know screenreaders handle them by reading that description. Mouse over to show that description in a tooltip sounds like a useful accessibilty feature. Does any browser or OS have that feature?
  - bsza 2y ago
    > Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.
    - davedx 2y ago
      :be_flag_emoji: Belgian Dutch :nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.
      - bsza 2y ago
        Pairing languages with anything is incorrect, because “language” is an ill-defined term, an attempt to loosely group together similar methods of communication. But not having a flag is even more incorrect, because then all you have is a list of words, and the meaning of a word depends on the... language! > The language is the same in each country Then you can select either. I don’t see how this detracts from the usability of the UI.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    I'll often paste flag emoji into the unicode program ( https://github.com/garabik/unicode https://github.com/garabik/unicode ) to get the country code letters for flags I don't recognise. It's pretty bad when people pick the wrong flag, because they don't know unicode, and are just looking at a tiny image on their phone screen.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    I think that browsers should show a little popup with the name of every emoji. It would be the alt text. I'm old and don't know what many of the emoji mean. Names wouldn't help with slang usage (see eggplant) but they would with the confusing ones and flags.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  Having the wrong symbol for something is worse than the inconvenience of not having a symbol.
  - cabirum 2y ago
    Wrong symbols are everywhere. Ever seen a save button with a floppy disk icon? Its not about pedantic accuracy -- if something works, do not touch it.
    - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
      But we are talking about using flags of countries for languages, which is a totally different "kind of wrong".
      - marginalia_nu 2y ago
        I'm not sure it is. Symbols operate by analogy, all language does. The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak". If you're living in the UK and are given the choice between Denmark and Australia, the latter is the more similar.
        ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
        > The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak" Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own flag - like Swiss German or Swiss Italian or Swiss French or do not have a flag in total, like (Swiss) Romansch. And no, Switzerland isn't the only "problematic" country and Romansch isn't the only language without a flag.
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
- untech 2y ago
  Well, why not use currency symbols to represent language? Same amount of correctness. If you like flags because they are colorful and memorable icons, you can use them to represent time zones. Much more convenient than some obscure "UTC+7" or "PT", isn’t it?
  - James_K 2y ago
    > Same amount of correctness. Because a currency symbol is less correct (think $) and isn't as recognisable. Flags have colours that make them easier to pick out, and can be displayed at much smaller resolutions.
    - untech 2y ago
      Why using $ symbol to represent English is less correct than using the US flag? (Re: colors: see my suggestion to use these colorful icons to represent time zones)
      - kuschku 2y ago
        If you differentiate between different types of english, it makes sense to show a US flag or UK flag for the different regional variations. If you have only one version per language, just show the flags side by side. UK/US/AU/NZ for english, DE/AT/CH for German, etc. On the other hand € stands for 20+ languages and $ means USD, NZD, CAD, many kinds of Peso and many other types of dollar.
        Nullabillity 2y ago
        Not to mention that many currencies don't have symbols at all.
        untech 2y ago
        Well, how many languages have flags? There are thousands of languages, but hundreds of countries. Surely, some languages would be left without a flag? And this doesn’t affect just some "obscure" languages. For instance, what flag would you use for Arabic, an official UN language? What language does a flag of India, most populous language stand for?
- derefr 2y ago
  People have proposed "language flags" before. In fact, Wikipedia even uses/maintains a set of them for Wiktionary entries (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_list https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_lis...) — although I've never personally noticed them in use in Wiktionary. (Does anyone have an example of a Wiktionary page that embeds one of these?)
  - jwells89 2y ago
    I like this concept, but worry that the space afforded in common UI (e.g. 16px tray/menubar icons) isn’t sufficient to display the added detail. Perhaps “language symbols”, which take the idea of language flags and simplifies them into colored glyphs that render nicely at small sizes could be a solution.
  - teg4n_ 2y ago
    It seems like these flags don’t uniquely represent specific languages. Look at how many languages have the flag of India.
- andy99 2y ago
  Right - a disk means save, and often it's downhill from there for many symbols in a new UI - various paint programs come to mind. I'm not from the UK but if I'm on a non-English site it's super obvious that a UK flag is likely to take me to English. If there's a clearer way, sure, but a lot of this seems to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, as an excuse to remind everyone that flags aren't languages which I don't think anybody was ever implying.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Plus it is funny when the British have to pick the American flag to select the language that we stole from them. OTOH, this “which country best represents the language” question can provide unhappy geopolitical reminders to people, so I think we should not do it.
- jackdorseyleft 2y ago
  The world emoji or just a grid-sphere symbol are the closest I've seen to hit the mark where flags aren't visible. Same with the "cog" for settings. I always know where settings are even on my chinese co-worker's phone.
HL33tibCe7 2y ago
I personally find that new UI much more difficult to parse.
peterhi 2y ago
But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语
- quadhome 2y ago
  Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages
  - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    Both versions is the correct answer, like in the screenshot in the article.
    - quadhome 2y ago
      Yes! I meant to write “only” in the foreign language. Good catch.
  - mik1998 2y ago
    I personally had no idea that icon let you change the language of articles (a concept I explicitly looked for before). Still confused at what the icon is actually supposed to mean.
    - bradrn 2y ago
      It’s a Chinese character and a Latin letter. The idea, presumably, being that of ‘multiple languages’.
      - nkrisc 2y ago
pyinstallwoes 2y ago
[flagged]
dadoum 2y ago
Keyboard layouts are more country related than language related. At least among French speakers that's the case. So using country flags probably makes sense here.
- jumasheff 2y ago
  Keyboard layouts might be linked to specific countries, but language usage extends far beyond national borders. For example, Russian is spoken by communities in the US who may not identify with the Russian flag (or even stand against it), and French is widely used in places like Niger, where the French flag may hold little relevance. Thus, associating languages strictly with country flags can overlook the diverse and global nature of language communities.
  - iraqmtpizza 2y ago
    Associating my use of Apple products with Apple Computer overlooks the diverse and global nature of computing communities
- ginko 2y ago
  There's multilingual countries with multiple local layouts. (Like Swiss German and Swiss French layouts for instance)
cabirum 2y ago
If asked to make icons for languages, whet else would you even use instead of flags? Icons help find things faster, and the users are used to seeing flags next to language labels. In some cases, a single flag indeed does not sufficiently describe an option. In this case, combine, like, two flags, e.g. (flag of Spain)(flag of Columbia), or invent some other clever icon to disambiguate selection.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
  > Icons help find things faster, [...] I _highly_ doubt that being able to input the name of the language (or country or whatever), both in its native and translated form, is slower than scrolling through all possible icons.
  - cableshaft 2y ago
    Example where entering the name of the laqnguage would be slower than scrolling through options: a video game with a controller. I don't think I've ever seen that as a 'type in the language you want' option, only scrolling through options. Also it might only have 5-10 options to begin with, since localization of a video game into a bunch of languages can be pretty expensive, especially if it's a text-heavy game.
  - franga2000 2y ago
    Typing the whole name takes longer and you don't always know exactly what to type, so you have to type a bit of the name, then look at the list. Flags help with the latter part. Here's a funny example of where flags are useful: People from Slovenia [SI] (natively "Slovenija") speak Slovene/Slovenian [sl], natively "Slovenščina", ajdective "slovensko". People from Slovakia [SK] (natively "Slovensko") speak Slovak [sk], natively "Slovenčina", adjective "slovensky". Opening up a language picker, I usually search for "slo" (if there even is a search bar!) and then read the options left. But since the difference can be as little as a single character, even without dyslexia and with good eyesight, I still screw it up sometimes. The flags however, even when small and/or blurry, can still be quite easily differentiated by anyone familiar with both.
jackvalentine 2y ago
I fairly often find myself deciding between flag of the United Kingdom or the flag of the United States of America as a choice for ‘English’ wondering will this just be different spelling or will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one. I live in neither country, of course.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  I like the post-Brexit solution of using the Éire flag.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Just be neutral and go for India. Or Australia. Or randomly pick from all English speaking countries...
  - dTP90pN 2y ago
    The real solution is obviously to use geolocation to find the closest country which officially uses the individual language(s).
  - jackvalentine 2y ago
    In that situation my country would probably be an option so I wouldn’t be choosing between UK or USA…
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one I recently tried to switch the locale of my work computer to en-GB, on a en-US distro and retaining the en-US keyboard layout. The result is... unpleasant and some things (notably vSphere) just casually ignore both the user software settings (Firefox) and the OS settings.
  - jackvalentine 2y ago
    We _cannot_ get our office 365 environment to consistently use the correct locale. It’s shockingly frustrating to find yet another place that uses U.S. date format and spelling.
082349872349872 2y ago
Not a serious proposal: Google is pretty good at detecting when I have the keyboard in the wrong character set and providing me with results for what I would have typed; maybe there just needs to be a text box where you type "what the fuck?" in your own language and script, and the back end guesses it from there?
mkl95 2y ago
In my experience, most engineers and product managers assume that users are governed by some monolithic, absolute power with a single official way of doing things. This is useful early on to deliver their MVP and grab their first batch of users. However, their assumption quickly falls apart when a significant subset of those users live in some region with their own regulations. Gambling/betting, invoicing, and payment processing are just a few examples. If I see a flag icon next to a language, it's not worrying by itself, but it's a red flag about how things work under the hood. It's telling me that the company does not go the extra mile to build a realistic mental model that works for all users. And eventually, the product's limitations will impact some feature that is mission critical for my business.
thom 2y ago
Perhaps one day the engineers and designers will make peace, the former conceding the need to be technically correct despite wildly successful UI, the latter adding bevels back to buttons.
ncclporterror 2y ago
The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US. I would argue that using either the UK or US flag is less likely to confuse anyone than not using any flag, and that anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin. The fact that any mapping from a language to a flag is to some extent arbitrary does not imply that no mapping at all is better. This sounds like a variation of the Sorites paradox. Furthermore, I find it amusing that a website dedicated to languages, which are roughly sets of arbitrary conventions we use to communicate, is offended by the choice of another arbitrary convention to communicate.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  English is the official language of the United Kingdom, so their argument doesn't make sense.
  - ncclporterror 2y ago
    The website makes further arguments: English is the official language in many other countries, therefore choosing the UK is arbitrary. You could define a complicated rule to make it less arbitrary, but then the choice of the rule itself would be arbitrary. I think the point that any mapping will be to some extent arbitrary is correct. The problem for me is arguing that because any arbitrary convention will be offending or confusing to some, then no convention should be chosen. As opposed to the practical idea of just picking a convention that makes sense.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    The UK, like the US, doesn't have an official language. Though, constituent parts of it have given official standing to other languages.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  There's always ISO 639, which has three chances of being acceptable to end users: slim, fat, and none. What flag would you suggest for http://als.wikipedia.org http://als.wikipedia.org or http://pdc.wikipedia.org http://pdc.wikipedia.org ?
sverhagen 2y ago
I had this fight for a few years while I worked on the development of parking systems (ie. kiosk/pos systems used in parking garages). The use of those flags was so deeply engrained in that industry... For Dutch speakers, folks in Belgium had to choose the flag of the Netherlands. French flag for the Wallons. Flag of Germany for that small part of Belgium that speaks German. Sometimes blended Dutch/Belgian and French/Belgian flags were used, but never a blended German/Belgian flag. Also, the French and Dutch flags have the same colors. It was a mess. But the coworkers wanted it, the customers wanted it, I probably gave in, I don't remember... Edit: I had a similar fight over the difference between time zones and time periods.
throw__away7391 2y ago
This feels more like someone with a political axe to grind rather than a UX one. I travel full time and lived in 20 countries in the last year. Unfortunately many sites deliberately ignore Accept-Language headers and instead geolocate you and guess your language, localizing the entire site including the language selection menu, so this is a problem I am very familiar with and I constantly need to change the language on virtually every site I visit. Ideally a site's language selection menu button includes a globe icon so you can figure out where need to click to change the language, and a flag for quick identification.
moltar 2y ago
I agree in principle. But the Apple example is a bad one. Because Apple was showing country specific language variations. E.g. English (Canada) had a Canadian flag. Which for Canadians would be easy to spot as everyone knows perfectly well the flag of their country and it’ll immediately jump out due to pattern recognition. Thus better outcomes for the end user. Thus better UX.
dgan 2y ago
Tangential rant: Anything that tries to second-guess what user meant is doomed for failure in some (not even so obscure) cases I prefer all my UI in English, because it's easier to navigate settings. But i also hate when google tries to be smart and (poorly) auto translates the reviews in Maps from one of the languages I fluently speak, to English. I didn't find any way to separate those settings. Also, i believe, Libre Office tries to deduce the monetary units from OS settings, and forces me to changes dollars to euros. Just ask me what i want!
- jumasheff 2y ago
  What's annoying is that Google is forcing me to use some of its products in Russian which is offensive to me!
  - dgan 2y ago
    Explain? Why can't you use English for example?
    - andylynch 2y ago
      Sometimes Google seems / seemed to decide its idea of your location should trump your browser or even account settings. At one point our (Swiss, in England) office often had Google.com deciding we should be reading in Polish. Never really understood why.
    - jumasheff 2y ago
      In my settings I applied Kyrgyz as my primary language and English as the second one: https://imgz.org/iCtBEEby.png https://imgz.org/iCtBEEby.png For some reason Google decides that I prefer Russian even if I am forcing it to use English (assuming that `?hl=en` switches the interface language): https://imgz.org/i36byD3g.png https://imgz.org/i36byD3g.png
- throw__away7391 2y ago
  If only there was some two decades old standardized way for users to specify which languages they prefer, and, dare I dream, the order and relative level of preference.
jiehong 2y ago
I always thought they should be using the flag of the UN to indicate the location of a language selection dropdown, and just list the name of the languages in their native form in the list. But being able to choose the language is always much better than sites forcing you to use a specific version of a site depending on your location, which is such a pain. Side note: seeing the Taiwanese flag for traditional Chinese is kinda like the French flag in Switzerland for Hong Kong. The French flag is a particular offender, with so many countries speaking French in Europe, Africa or Canada.
- morbicer 2y ago
  How do they call the language they speak? French? You know where the language originates and why is it called French? I kinda understand some of the arguments and sensitivities and some examples on the website are dumb but it's also dumb to deny that French language can't be associated with France. I bet people in Quebec and Niger can make the connection when they open the dropdown that this will be the language they speak. Let's not lose the practical aspect of quick recognition. I know there might be 20+ languages spoken in Niger but they won't be on your run-of-the-mill eshop. The dropdown will have 10 options at most and the person in Niger can make the pick faster with the French flag. The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic. By your logic I'm not sure why this is a conundrum—Saudi Arabia, of course! Arabic is actually the perfect example of why flags for languages are problematic—just because two countries share a language doesn't mean they're on good terms with each other. That's easy to see with Arabic because tensions in the Middle East are always in the news. You know instinctively that using the Saudi flag to represent Arabic would be a terrible idea. But the same problems apply to other countries, just less prominently. African people often have... complicated feelings towards the countries that were their former colonizers. The language is theirs now, for better or worse, but that doesn't mean that they're comfortable picking a French flag when selecting the language for their personal device.
ryandrake 2y ago
At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
- bjackman 2y ago
  I browse the web in multiple languages. I don't even know how to change my Accept-Language headers. I prefer to be able to just choose the language while I'm browsing. That also lets me easily see what languages the site actually offers.
  - masklinn 2y ago
    I also browse the web in multiple languages. Accept-Language follows the language selection of the browser or OS (sadly Apple is kinda stupid so they only use the first language configured in system preferences, if you configure multiple languages in Firefox's preferences it actually follows that). I absolutely love when websites randomly pick a language I can't read, which is not anywhere in my accept-languages (which does contain languages they do support), with a language selector hidden somewhere unspecified on the page. It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else. That second paragraph is sarcastic, just in case.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else. But if you could read, you wouldn't consent to it...
      - masklinn 2y ago
        I often can't even consent, because I don't even know what button would be "Yes sure I'll sell my soul to you for no consideration that sounds great".
affgrff2 2y ago
Is there a language with a flag apart from Esperanto?
deepsun 2y ago
Still a lot of websites (including Google) ignore "Accept-Language" header, and show language based on my geolocated IP address. Dude, if I'm visiting Netherlands it doesn't mean I speak Dutch. At least I can guess some words cause it's Latin alphabet. But when I visited Georgia I had no idea what მიღება even sounds like.
- grumbel 2y ago
  That's really the core of the issue. Language switching is such a common thing that it should be part of Web infrastructure itself, not the individual Website, and it sort of is. But most Websites ignore those preferences and browsers have those settings hidden so deep away that no user will even be aware of them. Having a little icon in your browser, not the Website, to switch language would make this issue largely go away. What symbol you use in the end doesn't really matter, the issue is that every site does it a little differently.
  - amaccuish 2y ago
    Great idea! I guess though you'd need a new header for a website to declare what languages a page is available in, so the menu options in the browser would only show languages that are actually available? Or a new meta tag? Or maybe there is one already?
  - eloisius 2y ago
    Hidden deeply in browser settings because the browser should inherit the locale from your OS, right?
    - watwut 2y ago
      Absolutely not. I don't want the same language on all apps and the one I have on apps is not necessary the one I want on your site.
      - eloisius 2y ago
        That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the browser. But by default, the entire stack should respect the setting I configured at the top.
throwaway22032 2y ago
My 2c: I think that symbols are useful in this case and that the number of potentially ambiguous/offensive situations is low enough that scrapping flags is worse overall. Bathroom signs come to mind. Yes, not all men wear trousers, yes, not all women wear skirts, if you swing that way, perhaps not all men are men. Some of us don't even have legs. But you know what it means, it's standardised, and it saves us all a ton of time not having to do a double take at a clever bathroom door with an art project on it, in the same way that a flag in the corner of a webpage immediately draws the eye.
gumby 2y ago
It’s a convincing essay, even though I miss seeing my country’s flag in the menu bar (especially as I’m not living there).
Someone 2y ago
I would guess Apple removed the flags to sidestep thorny geopolitical issues. For example, China and Taiwan will disagree on what flag to show for the language they share. Also, the article shows two different parts of the UI. For Monterey, it shows the UI for adding a language, for the older OS, that for adding a keyboard layout. That UI still has ‘icons’ (a dark rounded rectangle with letters in it, for example “SQ” for “Albanian” or “USPC” for “US International – PC”) in Monterey.
armagon 2y ago
This is interesting as I've been working on localisation for an app I've made. It's in Electron. I find it super frustrating that when I ask for `navigator.languages` I get 'en-US' first, even though I have my language set to 'en-CA' (which showed up second, I think). I can only assume they were working around some dumb web software that didn't realise that if it didn't see your specific language code it should fall back to a more generic language. Anyone got tips for getting the most specific language code in the general case?
rado 2y ago
JavaScript is not a layout tool https://youtube.com/shorts/kGkKV9KVcKc?si=fJD9nqlK38buAkU8 https://youtube.com/shorts/kGkKV9KVcKc?si=fJD9nqlK38buAkU8
wan23 2y ago
As a typical American, I have no idea what the flag of England (or the UK) looks like despite being fairly well educated. When this flag for language thing comes up I usually end up doing some kind of guess and check thing to find English. Since this doesn't happen very often I always forget which one I'm supposed to pick.

109 points by edward 2y ago

Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.

davedx 2y ago
Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple. Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.
- kapep 2y ago
  Every unicode emoji has an offical short description. As far as I know screenreaders handle them by reading that description. Mouse over to show that description in a tooltip sounds like a useful accessibilty feature. Does any browser or OS have that feature?
- bsza 2y ago
  > Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.
  - davedx 2y ago
    :be_flag_emoji: Belgian Dutch :nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.
    - bsza 2y ago
      Pairing languages with anything is incorrect, because “language” is an ill-defined term, an attempt to loosely group together similar methods of communication. But not having a flag is even more incorrect, because then all you have is a list of words, and the meaning of a word depends on the... language! > The language is the same in each country Then you can select either. I don’t see how this detracts from the usability of the UI.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  I'll often paste flag emoji into the unicode program ( https://github.com/garabik/unicode https://github.com/garabik/unicode ) to get the country code letters for flags I don't recognise. It's pretty bad when people pick the wrong flag, because they don't know unicode, and are just looking at a tiny image on their phone screen.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  I think that browsers should show a little popup with the name of every emoji. It would be the alt text. I'm old and don't know what many of the emoji mean. Names wouldn't help with slang usage (see eggplant) but they would with the confusing ones and flags.
JimDabell 2y ago
Having the wrong symbol for something is worse than the inconvenience of not having a symbol.
- cabirum 2y ago
  Wrong symbols are everywhere. Ever seen a save button with a floppy disk icon? Its not about pedantic accuracy -- if something works, do not touch it.
  - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    But we are talking about using flags of countries for languages, which is a totally different "kind of wrong".
    - marginalia_nu 2y ago
      I'm not sure it is. Symbols operate by analogy, all language does. The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak". If you're living in the UK and are given the choice between Denmark and Australia, the latter is the more similar.
      - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
        > The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak" Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own flag - like Swiss German or Swiss Italian or Swiss French or do not have a flag in total, like (Swiss) Romansch. And no, Switzerland isn't the only "problematic" country and Romansch isn't the only language without a flag.
        marginalia_nu 2y ago
untech 2y ago
Well, why not use currency symbols to represent language? Same amount of correctness. If you like flags because they are colorful and memorable icons, you can use them to represent time zones. Much more convenient than some obscure "UTC+7" or "PT", isn’t it?
- James_K 2y ago
  > Same amount of correctness. Because a currency symbol is less correct (think $) and isn't as recognisable. Flags have colours that make them easier to pick out, and can be displayed at much smaller resolutions.
  - untech 2y ago
    Why using $ symbol to represent English is less correct than using the US flag? (Re: colors: see my suggestion to use these colorful icons to represent time zones)
    - kuschku 2y ago
      If you differentiate between different types of english, it makes sense to show a US flag or UK flag for the different regional variations. If you have only one version per language, just show the flags side by side. UK/US/AU/NZ for english, DE/AT/CH for German, etc. On the other hand € stands for 20+ languages and $ means USD, NZD, CAD, many kinds of Peso and many other types of dollar.
      - Nullabillity 2y ago
        Not to mention that many currencies don't have symbols at all.
        untech 2y ago
        Well, how many languages have flags? There are thousands of languages, but hundreds of countries. Surely, some languages would be left without a flag? And this doesn’t affect just some "obscure" languages. For instance, what flag would you use for Arabic, an official UN language? What language does a flag of India, most populous language stand for?
derefr 2y ago
People have proposed "language flags" before. In fact, Wikipedia even uses/maintains a set of them for Wiktionary entries (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_list https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_lis...) — although I've never personally noticed them in use in Wiktionary. (Does anyone have an example of a Wiktionary page that embeds one of these?)
- jwells89 2y ago
  I like this concept, but worry that the space afforded in common UI (e.g. 16px tray/menubar icons) isn’t sufficient to display the added detail. Perhaps “language symbols”, which take the idea of language flags and simplifies them into colored glyphs that render nicely at small sizes could be a solution.
- teg4n_ 2y ago
  It seems like these flags don’t uniquely represent specific languages. Look at how many languages have the flag of India.
andy99 2y ago
Right - a disk means save, and often it's downhill from there for many symbols in a new UI - various paint programs come to mind. I'm not from the UK but if I'm on a non-English site it's super obvious that a UK flag is likely to take me to English. If there's a clearer way, sure, but a lot of this seems to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, as an excuse to remind everyone that flags aren't languages which I don't think anybody was ever implying.
bee_rider 2y ago
Plus it is funny when the British have to pick the American flag to select the language that we stole from them. OTOH, this “which country best represents the language” question can provide unhappy geopolitical reminders to people, so I think we should not do it.
jackdorseyleft 2y ago
The world emoji or just a grid-sphere symbol are the closest I've seen to hit the mark where flags aren't visible. Same with the "cog" for settings. I always know where settings are even on my chinese co-worker's phone.

HL33tibCe7 2y ago

I personally find that new UI much more difficult to parse.

peterhi 2y ago

But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语

quadhome 2y ago
Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
  Both versions is the correct answer, like in the screenshot in the article.
  - quadhome 2y ago
    Yes! I meant to write “only” in the foreign language. Good catch.
- mik1998 2y ago
  I personally had no idea that icon let you change the language of articles (a concept I explicitly looked for before). Still confused at what the icon is actually supposed to mean.
  - bradrn 2y ago
    It’s a Chinese character and a Latin letter. The idea, presumably, being that of ‘multiple languages’.
    - nkrisc 2y ago

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

[flagged]

dadoum 2y ago

Keyboard layouts are more country related than language related. At least among French speakers that's the case. So using country flags probably makes sense here.

jumasheff 2y ago
Keyboard layouts might be linked to specific countries, but language usage extends far beyond national borders. For example, Russian is spoken by communities in the US who may not identify with the Russian flag (or even stand against it), and French is widely used in places like Niger, where the French flag may hold little relevance. Thus, associating languages strictly with country flags can overlook the diverse and global nature of language communities.
- iraqmtpizza 2y ago
  Associating my use of Apple products with Apple Computer overlooks the diverse and global nature of computing communities
ginko 2y ago
There's multilingual countries with multiple local layouts. (Like Swiss German and Swiss French layouts for instance)

cabirum 2y ago

If asked to make icons for languages, whet else would you even use instead of flags? Icons help find things faster, and the users are used to seeing flags next to language labels. In some cases, a single flag indeed does not sufficiently describe an option. In this case, combine, like, two flags, e.g. (flag of Spain)(flag of Columbia), or invent some other clever icon to disambiguate selection.

ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
> Icons help find things faster, [...] I _highly_ doubt that being able to input the name of the language (or country or whatever), both in its native and translated form, is slower than scrolling through all possible icons.
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Example where entering the name of the laqnguage would be slower than scrolling through options: a video game with a controller. I don't think I've ever seen that as a 'type in the language you want' option, only scrolling through options. Also it might only have 5-10 options to begin with, since localization of a video game into a bunch of languages can be pretty expensive, especially if it's a text-heavy game.
- franga2000 2y ago
  Typing the whole name takes longer and you don't always know exactly what to type, so you have to type a bit of the name, then look at the list. Flags help with the latter part. Here's a funny example of where flags are useful: People from Slovenia [SI] (natively "Slovenija") speak Slovene/Slovenian [sl], natively "Slovenščina", ajdective "slovensko". People from Slovakia [SK] (natively "Slovensko") speak Slovak [sk], natively "Slovenčina", adjective "slovensky". Opening up a language picker, I usually search for "slo" (if there even is a search bar!) and then read the options left. But since the difference can be as little as a single character, even without dyslexia and with good eyesight, I still screw it up sometimes. The flags however, even when small and/or blurry, can still be quite easily differentiated by anyone familiar with both.

jackvalentine 2y ago

I fairly often find myself deciding between flag of the United Kingdom or the flag of the United States of America as a choice for ‘English’ wondering will this just be different spelling or will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one. I live in neither country, of course.

082349872349872 2y ago
I like the post-Brexit solution of using the Éire flag.
Ekaros 2y ago
Just be neutral and go for India. Or Australia. Or randomly pick from all English speaking countries...
- dTP90pN 2y ago
  The real solution is obviously to use geolocation to find the closest country which officially uses the individual language(s).
- jackvalentine 2y ago
  In that situation my country would probably be an option so I wouldn’t be choosing between UK or USA…
justsomehnguy 2y ago
> will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one I recently tried to switch the locale of my work computer to en-GB, on a en-US distro and retaining the en-US keyboard layout. The result is... unpleasant and some things (notably vSphere) just casually ignore both the user software settings (Firefox) and the OS settings.
- jackvalentine 2y ago
  We _cannot_ get our office 365 environment to consistently use the correct locale. It’s shockingly frustrating to find yet another place that uses U.S. date format and spelling.

082349872349872 2y ago

Not a serious proposal: Google is pretty good at detecting when I have the keyboard in the wrong character set and providing me with results for what I would have typed; maybe there just needs to be a text box where you type "what the fuck?" in your own language and script, and the back end guesses it from there?

mkl95 2y ago

In my experience, most engineers and product managers assume that users are governed by some monolithic, absolute power with a single official way of doing things. This is useful early on to deliver their MVP and grab their first batch of users. However, their assumption quickly falls apart when a significant subset of those users live in some region with their own regulations. Gambling/betting, invoicing, and payment processing are just a few examples. If I see a flag icon next to a language, it's not worrying by itself, but it's a red flag about how things work under the hood. It's telling me that the company does not go the extra mile to build a realistic mental model that works for all users. And eventually, the product's limitations will impact some feature that is mission critical for my business.

thom 2y ago

Perhaps one day the engineers and designers will make peace, the former conceding the need to be technically correct despite wildly successful UI, the latter adding bevels back to buttons.

ncclporterror 2y ago

The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US. I would argue that using either the UK or US flag is less likely to confuse anyone than not using any flag, and that anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin. The fact that any mapping from a language to a flag is to some extent arbitrary does not imply that no mapping at all is better. This sounds like a variation of the Sorites paradox. Furthermore, I find it amusing that a website dedicated to languages, which are roughly sets of arbitrary conventions we use to communicate, is offended by the choice of another arbitrary convention to communicate.

RobotToaster 2y ago
English is the official language of the United Kingdom, so their argument doesn't make sense.
- ncclporterror 2y ago
  The website makes further arguments: English is the official language in many other countries, therefore choosing the UK is arbitrary. You could define a complicated rule to make it less arbitrary, but then the choice of the rule itself would be arbitrary. I think the point that any mapping will be to some extent arbitrary is correct. The problem for me is arguing that because any arbitrary convention will be offending or confusing to some, then no convention should be chosen. As opposed to the practical idea of just picking a convention that makes sense.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
  The UK, like the US, doesn't have an official language. Though, constituent parts of it have given official standing to other languages.
082349872349872 2y ago
There's always ISO 639, which has three chances of being acceptable to end users: slim, fat, and none. What flag would you suggest for http://als.wikipedia.org http://als.wikipedia.org or http://pdc.wikipedia.org http://pdc.wikipedia.org ?

sverhagen 2y ago

I had this fight for a few years while I worked on the development of parking systems (ie. kiosk/pos systems used in parking garages). The use of those flags was so deeply engrained in that industry... For Dutch speakers, folks in Belgium had to choose the flag of the Netherlands. French flag for the Wallons. Flag of Germany for that small part of Belgium that speaks German. Sometimes blended Dutch/Belgian and French/Belgian flags were used, but never a blended German/Belgian flag. Also, the French and Dutch flags have the same colors. It was a mess. But the coworkers wanted it, the customers wanted it, I probably gave in, I don't remember... Edit: I had a similar fight over the difference between time zones and time periods.

throw__away7391 2y ago

This feels more like someone with a political axe to grind rather than a UX one. I travel full time and lived in 20 countries in the last year. Unfortunately many sites deliberately ignore Accept-Language headers and instead geolocate you and guess your language, localizing the entire site including the language selection menu, so this is a problem I am very familiar with and I constantly need to change the language on virtually every site I visit. Ideally a site's language selection menu button includes a globe icon so you can figure out where need to click to change the language, and a flag for quick identification.

moltar 2y ago

I agree in principle. But the Apple example is a bad one. Because Apple was showing country specific language variations. E.g. English (Canada) had a Canadian flag. Which for Canadians would be easy to spot as everyone knows perfectly well the flag of their country and it’ll immediately jump out due to pattern recognition. Thus better outcomes for the end user. Thus better UX.

dgan 2y ago

Tangential rant: Anything that tries to second-guess what user meant is doomed for failure in some (not even so obscure) cases I prefer all my UI in English, because it's easier to navigate settings. But i also hate when google tries to be smart and (poorly) auto translates the reviews in Maps from one of the languages I fluently speak, to English. I didn't find any way to separate those settings. Also, i believe, Libre Office tries to deduce the monetary units from OS settings, and forces me to changes dollars to euros. Just ask me what i want!

jumasheff 2y ago
What's annoying is that Google is forcing me to use some of its products in Russian which is offensive to me!
- dgan 2y ago
  Explain? Why can't you use English for example?
  - andylynch 2y ago
    Sometimes Google seems / seemed to decide its idea of your location should trump your browser or even account settings. At one point our (Swiss, in England) office often had Google.com deciding we should be reading in Polish. Never really understood why.
  - jumasheff 2y ago
    In my settings I applied Kyrgyz as my primary language and English as the second one: https://imgz.org/iCtBEEby.png https://imgz.org/iCtBEEby.png For some reason Google decides that I prefer Russian even if I am forcing it to use English (assuming that `?hl=en` switches the interface language): https://imgz.org/i36byD3g.png https://imgz.org/i36byD3g.png
throw__away7391 2y ago
If only there was some two decades old standardized way for users to specify which languages they prefer, and, dare I dream, the order and relative level of preference.

jiehong 2y ago

I always thought they should be using the flag of the UN to indicate the location of a language selection dropdown, and just list the name of the languages in their native form in the list. But being able to choose the language is always much better than sites forcing you to use a specific version of a site depending on your location, which is such a pain. Side note: seeing the Taiwanese flag for traditional Chinese is kinda like the French flag in Switzerland for Hong Kong. The French flag is a particular offender, with so many countries speaking French in Europe, Africa or Canada.

morbicer 2y ago
How do they call the language they speak? French? You know where the language originates and why is it called French? I kinda understand some of the arguments and sensitivities and some examples on the website are dumb but it's also dumb to deny that French language can't be associated with France. I bet people in Quebec and Niger can make the connection when they open the dropdown that this will be the language they speak. Let's not lose the practical aspect of quick recognition. I know there might be 20+ languages spoken in Niger but they won't be on your run-of-the-mill eshop. The dropdown will have 10 options at most and the person in Niger can make the pick faster with the French flag. The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic. By your logic I'm not sure why this is a conundrum—Saudi Arabia, of course! Arabic is actually the perfect example of why flags for languages are problematic—just because two countries share a language doesn't mean they're on good terms with each other. That's easy to see with Arabic because tensions in the Middle East are always in the news. You know instinctively that using the Saudi flag to represent Arabic would be a terrible idea. But the same problems apply to other countries, just less prominently. African people often have... complicated feelings towards the countries that were their former colonizers. The language is theirs now, for better or worse, but that doesn't mean that they're comfortable picking a French flag when selecting the language for their personal device.

ryandrake 2y ago

At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.

bjackman 2y ago
I browse the web in multiple languages. I don't even know how to change my Accept-Language headers. I prefer to be able to just choose the language while I'm browsing. That also lets me easily see what languages the site actually offers.
- masklinn 2y ago
  I also browse the web in multiple languages. Accept-Language follows the language selection of the browser or OS (sadly Apple is kinda stupid so they only use the first language configured in system preferences, if you configure multiple languages in Firefox's preferences it actually follows that). I absolutely love when websites randomly pick a language I can't read, which is not anywhere in my accept-languages (which does contain languages they do support), with a language selector hidden somewhere unspecified on the page. It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else. That second paragraph is sarcastic, just in case.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else. But if you could read, you wouldn't consent to it...
    - masklinn 2y ago
      I often can't even consent, because I don't even know what button would be "Yes sure I'll sell my soul to you for no consideration that sounds great".

affgrff2 2y ago

Is there a language with a flag apart from Esperanto?

deepsun 2y ago

Still a lot of websites (including Google) ignore "Accept-Language" header, and show language based on my geolocated IP address. Dude, if I'm visiting Netherlands it doesn't mean I speak Dutch. At least I can guess some words cause it's Latin alphabet. But when I visited Georgia I had no idea what მიღება even sounds like.

grumbel 2y ago
That's really the core of the issue. Language switching is such a common thing that it should be part of Web infrastructure itself, not the individual Website, and it sort of is. But most Websites ignore those preferences and browsers have those settings hidden so deep away that no user will even be aware of them. Having a little icon in your browser, not the Website, to switch language would make this issue largely go away. What symbol you use in the end doesn't really matter, the issue is that every site does it a little differently.
- amaccuish 2y ago
  Great idea! I guess though you'd need a new header for a website to declare what languages a page is available in, so the menu options in the browser would only show languages that are actually available? Or a new meta tag? Or maybe there is one already?
- eloisius 2y ago
  Hidden deeply in browser settings because the browser should inherit the locale from your OS, right?
  - watwut 2y ago
    Absolutely not. I don't want the same language on all apps and the one I have on apps is not necessary the one I want on your site.
    - eloisius 2y ago
      That’s exactly what I would want. My phone is set to a certain locale and language. By default I would want my apps to appear in that language, and websites. I may want to set a particular website to another language, and I’d appreciate a setting in the site that does it, but it should respect my default first. Up a level, if I want all websites in a different language than my OS, I’d go digging for a setting in the browser. But by default, the entire stack should respect the setting I configured at the top.

throwaway22032 2y ago

My 2c: I think that symbols are useful in this case and that the number of potentially ambiguous/offensive situations is low enough that scrapping flags is worse overall. Bathroom signs come to mind. Yes, not all men wear trousers, yes, not all women wear skirts, if you swing that way, perhaps not all men are men. Some of us don't even have legs. But you know what it means, it's standardised, and it saves us all a ton of time not having to do a double take at a clever bathroom door with an art project on it, in the same way that a flag in the corner of a webpage immediately draws the eye.

gumby 2y ago

It’s a convincing essay, even though I miss seeing my country’s flag in the menu bar (especially as I’m not living there).

Someone 2y ago

I would guess Apple removed the flags to sidestep thorny geopolitical issues. For example, China and Taiwan will disagree on what flag to show for the language they share. Also, the article shows two different parts of the UI. For Monterey, it shows the UI for adding a language, for the older OS, that for adding a keyboard layout. That UI still has ‘icons’ (a dark rounded rectangle with letters in it, for example “SQ” for “Albanian” or “USPC” for “US International – PC”) in Monterey.

armagon 2y ago

This is interesting as I've been working on localisation for an app I've made. It's in Electron. I find it super frustrating that when I ask for `navigator.languages` I get 'en-US' first, even though I have my language set to 'en-CA' (which showed up second, I think). I can only assume they were working around some dumb web software that didn't realise that if it didn't see your specific language code it should fall back to a more generic language. Anyone got tips for getting the most specific language code in the general case?

rado 2y ago

JavaScript is not a layout tool https://youtube.com/shorts/kGkKV9KVcKc?si=fJD9nqlK38buAkU8 https://youtube.com/shorts/kGkKV9KVcKc?si=fJD9nqlK38buAkU8

wan23 2y ago

As a typical American, I have no idea what the flag of England (or the UK) looks like despite being fairly well educated. When this flag for language thing comes up I usually end up doing some kind of guess and check thing to find English. Since this doesn't happen very often I always forget which one I'm supposed to pick.