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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> a small icon with the three flags

this does not address the main problem that flags do not correspond to languages. German is spoken in more than "the three" countries, and in these countries there are more languages than German. Thus, using flags is insensitive and alienating to German speakers from other countries (e.g., Belgium), and non-German speakers from these three countries (e.g., Lugano).

And this is just for German! The situation is even more complicated for nearly all other languages in the world. Please, never use flags of states to identify languages. I have been on the receiving end of this unnecessarily offensive thing, and it did not feel nice.

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I get it, but - what's the solution? At least the flags, while being offensive to some, are generally understood as a "signal for language".

This feels a little nitpicky to me - as a short hand for language and currency flags are commonplace. But I understand the thinking: "a language is nothing but a dialect with a flag"

The alternative is to use ISO (En, De, Es) in brackets before the text begins. i.e. [DE] Wie Studien verdreht werden

Flags for currency mostly work because nations choose their flag and choose their currency. Flags for languages doesn't work because it's common for the same language to be popular in different countries and for multiple languages to be popular within a single country.

ISO language abbreviations would be a better alternative than the flags but I don't think anything is needed at all; anyone who knows German will recognize the post titles written in German and anyone who doesn't know it will still recognize that they're not in English.

The links do have `hreflang="de"` which in theory can programmatically indicate the language used at the destination, I'm not sure there's any technology that takes advantage of that. They could use a ::before pseudo-element with content: attributes(hreflang) to display the ISO code instead of the flag images. I would like to see `lang="de"` attributes on the German headings and paragraphs on the home page, they would tell screen readers to switch to a voice appropriate for the language when read aloud.

> Flags for currency mostly work

Do you think so?

Which flag would you use for euros? Obviously not the european union flag, since there are many countries inside the EU with a different currency (like Sweden or Poland) and even countries outside the EU whose currency is the euro (Montenegro, Kosovo, Andorra, ...).

Yeah, you're right. I did think EU membership was more aligned with use of the Euro (I only knew about the UK using the Pound but they're out). It's still true that each country chooses its currency but it would be just as weird to pick one country in the EU to represent Euros as picking one country to represent a language.

Same goes for Spanish. Which country's flag should represent it? Most people probably don't even know the flag of Spain and readers in Latin America might be offended.

I think the fact is that languages simply don't have visual symbols for them. They are spoken or written, not "looked at". Languages are linear, not 2-dimensional. Euros and Dollars have their symbol because that's what is printed on the 2D surface of bills.

I ...don't think that's actually a dealbreaker.

If the context is currencies, everyone would know that a european union flag refers to the euro.

it's a visual cue, not a translation into hieroglyphics.

None of the major sites that deal with languages (wikipedia, google translate, deepl) ever use flags to represent languages.

In the case of your website, however, I don't see why you need to specify the language of each entry. Is it a sort of "warning" for non-english entries? It seems unnecessary. And why aren't entries in English marked with the flag of the USA? (or Canada, or South Africa).

I would suggest doing what Wikipedia does: print the name of the language, in the language. So Deutsch for German, 日本語 for Japanese, and so on.

If you need a corresponding URI fragment, the ISO language codes exist for that reason.

How is using the German flag different from calling the language “German” (or Deutsch)?

Hundreds of states in the world, but thousands of languages. How do you want to do? Most languages do not bear the name of any state.

If the language is named after a country, use the country's flag. If not, use something else.

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