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Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to

• Y_Y 2y ago
  But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I already allocated it. This is going pretty well, but seems tedious, so for all other cases let's just merge ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 639-1 as follows: SELECT c.code AS common_code, c.country_name, l.language_name FROM iso_3166 c INNER JOIN iso_639 l ON c.code = l.code; And if they don't speak Afrikaans in Afghanistan or Arabic in Argentina then you'll have to take it up with the International Organization for Standardization.
  • the_other 2y ago
    Nice. Even Japan (jp) and Japanese (ja) lose out with this.
  • toolslive 2y ago
    So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)
    • ahoka 2y ago
      No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.
      • toolslive 2y ago
        Canada?
        • riffraff 2y ago
          TIL Canada is actually larger than India and it's not just a projection artifact!
        • marcosdumay 2y ago
          In area, yes. But then the China flag would represent a dozen languages. In population, no, the GP is correct.
    • Tijdreiziger 2y ago
      As a Surinamese Dutch person, I fail to see any issues with this approach. ;)
    • culi 2y ago
      That's not the only issue. India has over 1,600 native languages and 22 "official" ones. Which language would a country like that represent? What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?
      • SllX 2y ago
        Depends. The Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation both have flags to use that could theoretically be incorporated into Unicode if they didn't draw the line at National flags, but you could always draw flag representations in SVG instead. But I also think this discussion has gone so far into the theoretical it's kind of ignored a very practical point: how many languages do you need to present in your software, because your software is actually localized in that language? Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country (and even some of those are relatively obscure), and countries that have >1 languages usually share an official language with another country that uses it more predominantly. At this point in time, the economies of scale do not favor actually localizing software in 1600 different languages, so we don't. At all. In fact, the usual pattern for developers from Europe and the Americas is to favor their dominant language and localizing in other dominant languages that originated in Europe and some of their more popular variants, and then maybe also some combination of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu, and Korean. So when you're presented with a number of languages and variants exceeding 30 in a list, flags probably aren't going to cut it anymore, but there's still some design space to use flags as language representations if you want.
        • culi 2y ago
          > Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country There are over 30 languages in India with at least a million NATIVE speakers. 7 of those are in the top 30 most spoken languages in the world
          • Dylan16807 2y ago
    • marc_abonce 2y ago
      Sorry for the shameless plug, but I already made a reusable React component for that in case anybody needs it for their business: Npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-lang-selecta https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-lang-selecta Source code: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta
      • Y_Y 2y ago
        Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Maybe because people don't realize you're in on the joke and that this is a parody package.
      • mablopoule 2y ago
        That "Features included" selection is golden, the "Every file is called index to turn your code editor into a fun maze for the entire family to enjoy." item actually made me laugh out loud.
    • Y_Y 2y ago
      Joking aside, I have heard of people deliberately doing a sort of inverse version of this. For example, if you live in Barcelona then Ubuntu's installer will detect you as being in Madrid's timezones and wanted to use Spain Spanish locale. If you insist that you're in Andorra you get an equivalent timezone and the Catalan locale (which is the preference for a lot of people, despite the bizarre way of reporting time).
      • toolslive 2y ago
        I do this all the time: - I want proper English, - and Proper SI units, - and Euro as currency. So I put myself in Dublin.
        • extraduder_ire 2y ago
          I've heard this also enables some of the EU-mandated features in newer windows versions. Like being able to uninstall edge.
  • harrall 2y ago
    We had a good budget for localization at my previous place and had like 10 Englishes and some countries had both their local language and English as options.
    • Tijdreiziger 2y ago
      Oh man, international corporations forcing me into the translation of their website is a huge pet peeve of mine, as the translation is usually poor. Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.
      • terinjokes 2y ago
        Still annoyed I have to patch in en_NL on all my systems because glibc developers don't think it's legitimate.
  • immibis 2y ago
    "I represented some things with wrong symbols and it didn't work well, therefore the idea of using symbols to represent these things is wrong"
• david_allison 2y ago
  https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/ https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-r...
  • IshKebab 2y ago
    Doesn't really make a great case. I obviously recognise both the union jack and American flag as "English", and nobody would expect it to mean Welsh. Also there are approximately no people that speak Welsh and not English. It's one of those "yes technically you're right, but actually it still works really well in practice so sod off" things. It's like saying tomatoes should be in the fruit aisle. No thanks. Sometimes utility is more important than anal correctness.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• scrollaway 2y ago
  One of my favourite newly discovered YouTubers, K Klein, talks a lot about language. What sold me to subscribe to his channel is this absolutely wonderful bit with flags at 4:30: https://youtu.be/iQNdkdqoIdw?t=4m29s https://youtu.be/iQNdkdqoIdw?t=4m29s Flags aren’t languages. Listen to your elders.
  • DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    Short of web standardization, how should a language picker be designed for a website where presumably the main design goal is a non-default-language speaking user can pick out their language?
    • scrollaway 2y ago
      You can use the iso code of the language itself as an abbreviation, with the name of the language in that target language next to it. The iso code is OK to use if you need a short “icon” for the language. There is a few standard icons representing “Translation” if you need iconography for the idea of a language switcher, too. EN - English FR - Français RU - Русский
      • DiggyJohnson 2y ago
        Fair alternative, but would this not be much less recognizable on the page to a non-native speaker of the default language? What if you have so many locales that a menu or drop down is required? This does not seem to me like it’s a better solution, it just has different downsides.
        • scrollaway 2y ago
          Depends the kind of website you are looking at. But yes, my personal preference is to use the translation icon (it looks similar to the one used for Google and Apple translate apps), and next to it, the currently selected iso code. Then in the dropdown, as a list, what I mentioned above.
• stevage 2y ago
  Yeah, but there is definitely no better option. If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English. (Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)
  • BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
    https://languageicon.org/ https://languageicon.org/ strikes me as a plausibly better option for the scenario you describe.
    • stevage 2y ago
      Yeah, that looks...fine...but I think it would still take me longer to find than a Russian flag or whatever.
    • error503 2y ago
      It's a bit ironic that this page doesn't include a usage of the icon or any localization at all.
• crazygringo 2y ago
  But as long as languages don't have any symbol, and symbols help with recognition, is it maybe just a lesser of evils? It's clear that English originates from the UK and Portuguese originates from Portugal. Not to mention that sites often do have country variants -- the Brazilian Portuguese gets the Brazilian flag. And if a site is only for US and Mexican customers, a US flag makes sense rather than UK because it'll also use US currency. And a flag icon also helps your eye quickly find the localization drop-down mixed in with a bunch of other stuff in the footer.
• Alex-Programs 2y ago
  I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively. I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one. For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficult and rely on convention (e.g. the Egyptian flag for Arabic). The landing page (https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app) has a cloud of flags of the supported languages. It's an information dense, easy to scan way of seeing whether your language is supported. Sure, it's not technically 100% accurate, but what's the alternative?
  • bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
    Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly. Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation. Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch). Even your example of Sweden is naive, as we have Swedish, Finnish, Sapmi, Meänkieli and I would argue Älvdalska is another proper language too, even if it dont have official status. Its a very flawed idea and no matter how pretty it may look, it cant map to reality and is just misleading at best.
    • tyre 2y ago
      If someone see's the spanish flag on a language learning site, they're going to know it's spanish. No one looks at that and think, "hmm, no, I don't want to learn basque." It may be technically correct, but it's pretty obvious to people what it means. It's extremely common.
      • bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
        Its only being reinforced due to this kind of dumb presentation.
• rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages Says who? Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.
  • slater 2y ago
    Say people from countries with multiple languages. E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English. Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
    • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      That's fine for Switzerland. And I get the India case. But why does it have to concern some Finnish online store that also has English and Swedish as options? Do their actual users really care? Because that is the litmus test, not the opinion of someone writing a blog.
    • torstenvl 2y ago
      Are you claiming French- or German-speaking Swiss users don't know that they speak French or German? Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?
      • slater 2y ago
        Come on. I'm saying people in general don't want to be associated with a flag that's not of their country.
        • mrguyorama 2y ago
          I've played video games that required me to select the Union Jack to select english language. Despite two wars in our history, it does not bother me. Because it's a language selection screen for fucks sake, I'm not marrying anything, or committing to a lifelong alliance. If selecting the "wrong" flag makes you feel anything other than the mildest annoyance, seek professional mental help.
• troad 2y ago
  I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages. No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages. For the most common languages, flags are fine. Edit: I'm amused by the amount of replies that assume the only context that ever requires symbolic language representation is websites. Awesome, how do I add one of your JavaScript language drop-downs to a physical product label? Or an airline steward's name tag?
  • braiamp 2y ago
    The browser or the host system usually informs you about the language. Apple and Google solved the rest by using geofence data. If you have a menu/screen to select the language, you can write as much as you want and have overflow for the long list. Order them by current language based on collation, and done. People want "language" to be too accessible when it doesn't need to be. Also, see amazon.
  • xdennis 2y ago
    > No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. Yes, every language has a name and you can use that. If you prefer an imprecise flag over the actual name of the language then what you're saying is that you prefer style over substance. There's always space to show the language name.
    • troad 2y ago
      Why did you use letters to send your reply? Letters are a symbolic representation of language, but they are imprecise. I don't know the prosody of your utterance, what tone you used, what accent you're speaking, etc. This is unacceptable and I am very offended. /s Symbols are useful. You can quibble over the symbols chosen (they don't seem to do a lot of physical weighing in courts?), but that is fundamentally besides the point, which is 'how do I convey this widely understood concept in a limited amount of space?'.
    • 2y ago
• hiccuphippo 2y ago
  Should there be emojis to represent languages? Maybe it could be a new group. I'd rather not use the flag shape, maybe a circle with the 2 letter code and a background with the colors from the flag usually used to represent that language, mainly because people is already used to scan the lists looking for those colors.
  • Alex-Programs 2y ago
    I really wish there were. It'd make things a lot easier for me! There aren't really existing unambiguous language icons, at least for the majority of languages, so it'd be less about making them a formal emoji and more about actually inventing + "legitimising" new icons so they can be broadly and uncontroversially used. I doubt that'd happen in practice - there just isn't a pressing need, and you'd need an enormous (and likely controversial) public education campaign to make them adoptable - but it would be a neat design problem. r/vexillogy would have a field day.
  • riffraff 2y ago
    no, cause nobody would understand them. Words exist, and websites that needs to show a lot of languages (google translate, deepl, wikipedia etc) just show you a list of names. It's really the easiest solution, cause people are _also_ really used to scanning text for their own language.
  • kelseyfrog 2y ago
    It would be great if there were. I decided to see if such a thing existed and came across the Flag icons for languages page[1]. There is an absolutely hideous French, Belgium, Canadian mix flag so the bar for language emojis is very very low. In other words, it should be easy to do better. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages
• adzm 2y ago
  On the other hand, this is very helpful when things are already in a language you don't understand.
• lmm 2y ago
  As someone who uses websites, if you're not going to respect the browser's language setting (and most websites don't, for good reason) then please use a flag so that it's easy to find where I can switch away from your incorrectly-geodetected language setting. Flags do in fact represent languages, in that they are understood to denote languages, even if some people think they shouldn't.
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  > I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages I feel obliged to point out that majority of engineers get stuck in 3-hour-long meeting discussing corner cases "is Okinawan a separate language" or "what even is a language", while refusing to address the business problem at hand, which is "I want my European user to pick between Italian, French and Spanish". I used to enjoy these "yes but technically no" discussions, but then I understood they never lead anywhere, because they're about solving the problem in some imaginary world that only exists in some people's heads, rather than the real one. The truth is that there exist situations where using country flags is effective means of communicating the idea of a language. You might not like it, but that's how it works.