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> 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 actuall
by lolinder 3y 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.
- andylynch 3y agoEven for English it’s problematic. Do you use the flag of the UK?, the USA?, England?
- lolinder 3y agoYeah, definitely, but I find in this thread that using English as an example doesn't work because people will (from the perspective of someone in the US or UK) say that it's not a big deal to just pick a flag from a different country. In the case of the UK and the USA—where we're at worst friendly rivals—this is a reasonable take, but you can't generalize our relationship to all of the other countries in the world that speak the language of former colonizers.
- morbicer 3y agoI feel the colonial resentments and I am not a yeehaa proponent of flags. But let's be honest: will the translation of the page be in idiomatic Nigerian French? It's mostly likely going to be French French. I am not that offended by US flag for English because the spelling will most likely be American and thus different from UK and lot of other Commonwealth countries.