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Comment by jfernandezr | Hacker News Reader

Not talking about politics, here, but a flag usually denotes a country or region, not a language.

You should use a flag when you're referring to a country or region, for example when you have an e-commerce website and are just distributing in certain areas. But languages do not have flags associated and then should not be used in language selectors.

Check that the example in the GH thread has Spanish as one of their choices and has the Spanish flag. Spanish is talked in a lot of countries including Spain, but also Spain has 4 different official languages in its own state territory. So, there exists es_ES, es_MX, es_PE but also es_ES and ca_ES. What flag should we paint in each case?

I've seen this mistake soo many times...

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So what should be used as the icon for languages?

I accidently changed languages in my phone to Arabic on android. It uses no icons to display languages, when a language is chosen all the options changed to the localized Arabic names.

I think the only logical solution is to display the options in the language, eh Arabic in Arabic letters, English in English letters etc.

But icons would still be useful. But there isn't a universally accepted icon for any language.

> So what should be used as the icon for languages?

For each language, show name of language in that language + name of language in currently selected language.

Languages are hard.

A good solution: for each language option, include both the exonym (name of the language in the user's currently selected language) and the endonym (name of the language in that particular language). Make sure the search feature can fuzzy match either field.

And yes, do not include any icons whatsoever. Text only. A standard for visual depiction of languages is not going to come any time soon, and flags are completely unsuitable for the purpose.

This is probably fake but it's worth a chuckle https://old.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ezsjhj/all_atms_in...

I agree. As a Swiss speaking German I find to see the flag of Germany a bit jarring, especially Germans tend act as if the language belongs to Germany.

So just use the language code for languages?

It's just a service for the Swiss to warn them about the occasional use of "ß".

Huch?

The Swiss don't care. Really. My son sees the sharp s everyday in school and nobody has explained to him what it is and nobody is asking him to replicate that letter.

No need to warn the Swiss.

I mean the language is called German. Seems appropriate to use the German flag.

> use the language code for languages

This is the practice that I followed when I needed to add a regional-language pack for one of our SCCM packages. I put a "DEU" in the icon, not a German flag.

This is something I really hate in KDE- you choose date/time formats with a dropdown of flags, and it doesn't even give you a preview of the short format, so you have to cycle through hundreds of options and click-click-click each to find what you want, when all that's needed is [Language] + [yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM]* (or whatever) format string.

there are far fewer format options than countries, so this is an exercise in frustration

(*en_SE.UTF-8 btw)

Taiwan is a free and independent nation, regardless of what China or its hackers think.

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