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?
> No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages.
As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid.
Not to mention for all those languages that are not the majority language in any country.
You’re saying this on HN, where plenty of people work on software affecting tens of millions of people. You wanna leave your phone number and explain your “well I ain’t offended” strategy to the next PM who’ll ask you about their users in Taiwan? The Russian speakers in Ukraine who saw their homes demolished by those who brandish the flag you’re not offended by? Maybe I should just invite you to my country of Belgium (four languages, not one of them being “the Belgian one”) for you to see what people here routinely think of those who can’t imagine the simple differences :)
I had initially posted a joke reply to this, but I'll post a serious one: I care a lot more about getting necessary services to elderly, semi-literate Russian-speaking babushkas fleeing Ukraine, by giving them an obvious indicator (on e.g. a name tag) that someone can speak to them, help them, then I care about your completely absurd, concocted 'well akshuallys'.
I work in Brussels with a lot of Ukrainians — both fighters and refugees. I’ve made this a part of my day to day life since the full scale invasion. We until recently even shared an office with the Ukrainian Voices refugee committee, in fact.
Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much you’d like to contribute.
That's a useless way to rebut their specific argument. Not a single reason in your post.
You could talk about your experience, but you're not doing that.
And the claims they made about how much they care were not extreme. "Putting their money where their keyboard is" could be accomplished with $10. Would $10 make you happy or settle anything at all?
My experience? My experience is you have a lot of people who claim to care about Ukraine, but then go on to say things such as “they should just give up the land”.
The above conversation is a good example of this. Ukrainian people are very patriotic especially now, and flags are a highly symbolic and meaningful subject. And not wanting to listen to “just don’t use a flag for languages”, which is a ridiculously simple ask, to then pretend it’s not a big deal for those who lost their homes and families?
GP has no idea what it’s like to be be in the exact case they claim to care about. So yes, I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate those who don’t listen to the simplest asks.
Your experience with people claiming to care about Ukraine isn't relevant because the above user only claimed that they care about it significantly more than a thing they don't care about. That's a super weak claim.
You're twisting it into a major claim so you can put them down for failing to live up to your standards of caring, when it was only a relative comparison.
> GP has no idea what it’s like
Which you are not trying to remedy. You are only trying to prove they don't care enough, as if that's going to somehow prove their original claim about flag use incorrect.
> I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate
Instead of? Does that mean no explanation even if you get them to donate?
> those who don’t listen to the simplest ask
Simple doesn't mean correct. Both sides of this argument are simple.
Yes, sadly, by Stalin and Putin, not by the choice of language symbols.
Crimean Tartars, by the way, are a great example of a people that have their own flag, despite that flag not being the official flag of any independent nation-state. If someone is a speaker of Crimean Tartar, and working with Ukrainian refugees, they should add that flag to their name tag too.
Just wait because all official EU sites now use the Irish flag to represent English, and it's getting more common in other websites made in Europe.
As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.
But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.
I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...
But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.
English is an official language of Ireland, and by far the most wildly spoken. Gaeilge is also an official language but <4% of Irish people use it as their main language.
However, this is another reason why flags aren't a good choice for languages. It works for some of the main languages - German, French, etc. where there's a clear one to one link between originating country's flag and language.
It's less clear for English - the UK flag, the US flag, the Irish flag and apparently even the Canadian flag gets used.
It's basically impossible to choose a flag for minority languages, and many countries have multiple official and widely spoken unofficial languages. What flag should represent Balinese, for example?
I don't have a better solution, and if your site is translated to just a couple of languages it's fine. But I guess as machine translation gets closer to perfect and very cheap, it'll become more common to have lots of translations.
If somebody said to me, “I speak American”, I would infer that they meant the American dialect of the English language. If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic. Similarly, if I saw a Welsh flag on a language selection UI, I would assume that it represented the Welsh Brythonic language even though most Welsh people speak English.
Unicode makes this hard (though it does provide the Welsh flag) but in principle you could solve this for some minority languages. For instance if you wanted to support Catalan, just use the flag of Catalonia, since they have one. You don’t need to have a country to have a flag, and you don’t need to have a country for your flag to become part of Unicode. Unicode has the transgender flag for instance. For Balinese maybe I would just use the flag of Bali.
> If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic
But if someone said "I'm from Ireland", you should assume they speak English as their main language. Even if they say "I speak Irish", there's a high chance they're not fully fluent, it's an identity thing for many Irish people.
In any case, it's probably best not to read too much in to this. The whole point is that using flags to represent languages risks getting caught up in exactly this kind of minutiae.
The text EN is unique for English and removes all for it. Put a flag next to the text if you like.
That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?
I like how Wikipedia mitigates that problem by placing "Suggested languages" at the top (I think the top choices are inferred from either the Accept-Language HTTP header or the most common languages from the user's country) and below that there's a list of "Worldwide" languages which include the most used languages in the world, and finally the rest of the languages are grouped by continent.
There's also a search bar for filtering and it works with either the native or foreign name of the language. So, for example, typing "Finnish", "Suomi" or "Fines" (the latter is even misspelled, should be "Finés") will all filter out the right language.
Of course, there may be an edge case that's missing, but it's as close as perfect as it can get without reading the user's mind.
And it doesn't have to have every single language. There's over 7,000 languages in the world. It just needs to have languages for which content exists. For the vast vast majority of Wikipedia articles there are less than 10 languages available
You can build bigger menus that a popup and sort them into usable buckets.
Take a look at tesla.com. The shitty CEO aside, the language/locale menu does it right: An understandable globe icon opens a menu, that menu is sorted by continents, countries and for those countries languages - with their name written in their local script.
Google Translator lists languages' names, and the list is pretty reasonable. I'm confident that designers could make it work even on interfaces where the language is a more subtle option.
> 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.
Many languages don't correspond to flag ideograms, and many flags don't correspond to a single language.
Ideograms are fine so long as they can be replaced with a canonical word or phrase and still make sense.
Flags for languages fails that in many cases around the world- if I want to select Quebecoise French, neither the Canadian, French, or Quebec Province flags are appropriate.
Likewise, Switzerland has no official language, and many countries such as Belgium have multiple.
Not the GP, but ideograms/pictograms are overused, half of the time one has no idea what they are supposed to mean. That was already bad in desktop interfaces where you would at least get a tooltip when hovering the mouse over it, but that has gone out of fashion as well.
I frequently travel in places where I don’t speak the primary language — and having to hunt down a menu in a language I can’t read sounds a lot worse than having a flag I know visible on the main page.
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?'.
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.
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?