Flags Are Not Languages
flagsarenotlanguages.com
flagsarenotlanguages.com
As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option!
So I don’t think it’s very effective at that.
In don’t know that using flags for language settings is more semantic, but it’s convention so I know what it means.
I’ve seen flags used to indicate language settings for as long as I’ve been using computers.
Here's how the same chooser looks on Wiktionary — which is also how it used to look on Wikipedia, back when Wikipedia used the full default MediaWiki sidebar: https://oshi.at/HhVH/zhWZ.png
You've got a subsection header "In other languages"; and under it, a list of links titled with the names of languages. (This reads as: these are a set of popular suggested alternative language views of this page, and clicking these links will take you directly to the page in those languages.) And at the end of this list, aligned as the final list item, there's a button with a weird icon with the text "51 more" on it. (And this reads as: clicking here will expand some flyout menu or modal, which will allow you to see you the rest of the list of language options, and perhaps search within them.)
In that context, you don't really have to understand the meaning of the icon to know what to do; rather, the interaction of changing language is directed by the rest of the design, and going through it teaches you the meaning of the icon. Which allows you to later understand its use elsewhere in the site's design.
It's also been used in the Google Translate logo as well.
---
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%87
[1] Not only because of Simplified/Traditional/Japanese renderings (文 is mostly the same across all three), but more strokes for a small icon is a bad idea regardless
* The first element should be "use default/system language"
* Language names should be displayed untranslated: "Deutsch, English, français"
* Optionally display the language in the currently selected language
It's not exactly suggestive of a language selector. 文 means "text". "A" doesn't mean anything at all.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-translate/id414706506
That's why the languages should be presented in their "own" native form (name and alphabet), at least additionally. Which - using the native form and the translation in the current active locale - Apple does, btw., so at least on MacOS your problem does not exist.
But, wait. 语言设定 is "Language settings" and 重置设备 is "Reset device". So the problem here is a bit different, right?
I wonder if flags fix that one in any way.
It's the convention on sites to put the flags as a top-level element (but you could put "English" there just as easily). But on any device with a menu, the flags are usually only on the language list.
I've seen a website where the URL made it clear that the selected language was "en-US", but the flag displayed was the United Kingdom.
That's the weird part. Obviously, either one will set the language back to English.
I don’t see the need to upend this for some notion of offense or other type of PCness.
As just one example of what we're talking about, let's take Ireland: after generations of cultural oppression England caused a famine in Ireland that reduced the population by at least 20% between millions of deaths and millions of immigrants. Ireland still hasn't recovered its population to the pre-famine levels.
The Irish are literally still recovering from their abuse at the hands of England. They speak English because England made it so through generations of deliberate cultural extermination. It's unreasonable for you to dismiss their desire to not identify themselves with the British flag as some "type of PCness".
Also, on the other hand, China may get very cross with you if you refer to Taiwanese Chinese at all. How you refer to a language is inherently political, and hiding the flag changes the political statement you're making, but it doesn't eliminate it, nor does making a consistent decision like "no flag" mean you're going to consistently side with oppressor or oppressed.
This is all "types of PCness" and I don't say that to dismiss it or say that I would never do something for the sake of PCness, but mostly to say that throwing out flags seems like a cop-out and not addressing the problems on a case-by-case basis.
The bigger problems are probably countries with indigenous native languages that only exist in that country but are also a minority... many Latin American countries where you might put Spanish with that country's flag but there is Nahuatl or Quechua or whatever. But on the other hand realistically you are only localizing to Spanish, so again, you're just trying to pretend like you've made a neutral political choice by hiding the flag.
Having a little icon in your browser, not the Website, to switch language would make this issue largely go away. What symbol you use in the end doesn't really matter, the issue is that every site does it a little differently.
There's nothing worse than apps that are badly translated with no easy way to switch them to English just because they decided that they should use the OS language.
Typically website translations are pretty good, when they already invested resources into translations.
With apps, I want to pick the translation per app, again what I have set into windows has nothing to do with what I want in app.
Me setting a windows language should not cascade to any webpage. And I never ever want the automatic AI translation.
I’m saying this as someone who’s bilingual and lives in a foreign country. I usually want things in my mother tongue, but I’d prefer the original language to some crappy translation.
Of course, with google, you are likely logged in with an account and they should know better, but most other websites you visit, you are not, so they give you the version local to where you are, as that’s usually more correct than not.
Now where is that flag …
But despite having learned the Georgian alphabet and being able to read მიღება as "migheba" I still am none the wiser since I have no idea what that means.
Today my kid bought a pokemon toy and the box was only in Japanese. I proudly deciphered ニャスパー as "nyas'paa" but my son only recognized the name when I googled it and found the English spelling "nyasper" (we're not native English speakers so perhaps the translation would have been more obvious to some of you).
Long story short: knowing writing systems is super fun but often you need to know more about the actual language. That's especially true with languages like Arabic that don't spell out all the vowels
Unfortunately that's not solvable with the current system which only allows listing a preferred order of languages and that's that. Like if I'd list English first, I risk getting English content even on pages originally written in my native language, if I put my native language first, then e.g. MSDN puts up so so-quality machine translations instead of the original English.
In theory you'd have to differentiate between at least native text, high quality translations and low quality translations. Now good luck creating an UI for that and also good luck for getting publishers to classify their websites and its contents according to such a scheme…
Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.
A flag paired with a name, which the UI used to show, is as close to that as you can get. You can’t get exactly that because languages are not mathematical objects, they are organic, amorphous, ever-changing living things.
:nl_flag_emoji: Dutch Dutch
This doesn't make sense. The language is the same in each country, it uses the same official rules and grammar. Pairing languages with countries is just incorrect.
> The language is the same in each country
Then you can select either. I don’t see how this detracts from the usability of the UI.
It's pretty bad when people pick the wrong flag, because they don't know unicode, and are just looking at a tiny image on their phone screen.
The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak". If you're living in the UK and are given the choice between Denmark and Australia, the latter is the more similar.
Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own flag - like Swiss German or Swiss Italian or Swiss French or do not have a flag in total, like (Swiss) Romansch. And no, Switzerland isn't the only "problematic" country and Romansch isn't the only language without a flag.
Words do not have to be unique in language. You can lead an army and you can lead water in a lead pipe.
The next step is acknowledging that the flag doesn't contribute anything, but may cause confusion or negative associations with the flag's country. So what exactly is the point of using it at all?
One very useful property of flags is that the flag is the same in any language, even if the names for the languages are not.
Having a colorful icon is also helpful if you have problems reading text. Means you don't have to read all the languages' names that are on screen, you can do a coarse visual match by colors and then confirm by only reading the one name.
Modern low contrast monochrome flat UIs are a nightmare for people with reading disabilities and low-grade sight impairment. Speaking from my own experience. A dab of color does so much to help parse a UI. It doesn't have to be the perfect representation or unambiguous. Just give me something to help navigate the UI that isn't just monochrome text possibly with monochrome line-art icons.
Which Apple's version does.
Which comes first: Ελληνικά, العربية, Русский, or 日本語?
Flags assist by giving a second piece of information that can be used to identify the right language easier. They still perform this function even if the wrong flag is used. You can scan a list of flags with names faster than you can scan a list of weird unfamiliar language names.
Swiss German is German. It gets a German flag. Swiss French is French. It gets a French flag.
As a Brit you get used to American flags to denote English. It's just not a big deal. I mean I even use US English most of the time as I prefer the keyboard layout.
Barely any languages exist in the world without an associated country. You're looking for a problem where none exists. Romansh has like 50,000 speakers and a ton of those probably use something different on their computers anyway. But even there the clear and obvious choice is the Swiss flag.
Back in my day we all had to use ASCII, etc etc.
The entire point of TFA is that there isn’t a simple mapping between flags of countries and languages so we should probably stop trying to create one.
> Back in my day we all had to use ASCII, etc etc.
And it turned out that this assumption was a bad one hence the need for Unicode. Why make the same mistake again?
This isn’t an abstract technicality, forcing people to use the wrong flag can trigger some very strong negative emotions if you get it wrong.
Only time this is a problem is when the Ukrainian localization isn't even supported and the Ukrainians are forced to use Russian, but then isn't that the bigger problem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine
Speaking a language natively is not the same thing as nationality or allegiance to a flag, and it can be grossly offensive to confuse the two.
-----
I feel that like many other people I'm this thread, it'd probably be better to have the language be represented as itself in the "Select language"-menu instead of relying on flags. It would be more accessible, allow for choosing different dialects of the same language, avoid faux pas like the aforementioned thing with Russian-speaking Ukrainiand, and so on. Of course you'd also want a translated name of the language in the UI which would correspond to the current UI language, but having the language there in its native form is a must.
I'd be concerned if I saw a save button with a printer icon on it though – they're both recognisably computer peripherals but they're definitely not interchangeable!
As another example: gendered bathrooms. The icons used on gendered bathrooms have a woman wearing a skirt, and a man wearing trousers. These icons are "wrong": a man can wear a skirt, and a woman can wear trousers (in fact, nowadays most women do). It's nonetheless certainly more useful to have a "wrong" icon than none at all in this case.
I remember windows having flags for the languages, but now it is a strange A symbol that I have no clue what it is and I'd have no chance of finding if it was in the wrong language.
So, if you saw any of these languages in a list, you wouldn't select them?
英语
영어
อังกฤษ
One is the locale and the other is the language. The flag serves as a lookup index.
Now, sure, in some cases, like the Gatwick example in the site, that is wrong/questionable.
> There are some curious flag choices made for representing languages: such as Andorra for Catalan. With a population of around 80,000, there are are fewer people in Andorra than the seating capacity of Catalonia’s largest football ground, FC Barcelona’s Nou Camp (almost 100,000 people).
But flags can be a good help for people with some linguistic/reading difficulties (besides the issues when you need to find the 'switch language' option in an unknown (to you) language.
This is great UI design.
But my point is more like, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Your frustration with the Russian flag is justified, but so is the frustration of everyone else having to read through dozens of entries, possibly in a foreign language.
If you like flags because they are colorful and memorable icons, you can use them to represent time zones. Much more convenient than some obscure "UTC+7" or "PT", isn’t it?
Because a currency symbol is less correct (think $) and isn't as recognisable. Flags have colours that make them easier to pick out, and can be displayed at much smaller resolutions.
(Re: colors: see my suggestion to use these colorful icons to represent time zones)
If you have only one version per language, just show the flags side by side. UK/US/AU/NZ for english, DE/AT/CH for German, etc.
On the other hand € stands for 20+ languages and $ means USD, NZD, CAD, many kinds of Peso and many other types of dollar.
And this doesn’t affect just some "obscure" languages. For instance, what flag would you use for Arabic, an official UN language? What language does a flag of India, most populous language stand for?
How many flags would you use for Spanish? French?
In fact, Wikipedia even uses/maintains a set of them for Wiktionary entries (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_lis...) — although I've never personally noticed them in use in Wiktionary. (Does anyone have an example of a Wiktionary page that embeds one of these?)
Perhaps “language symbols”, which take the idea of language flags and simplifies them into colored glyphs that render nicely at small sizes could be a solution.
I'm not from the UK but if I'm on a non-English site it's super obvious that a UK flag is likely to take me to English. If there's a clearer way, sure, but a lot of this seems to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, as an excuse to remind everyone that flags aren't languages which I don't think anybody was ever implying.
OTOH, this “which country best represents the language” question can provide unhappy geopolitical reminders to people, so I think we should not do it.
Same with the "cog" for settings. I always know where settings are even on my chinese co-worker's phone.
I would argue that using either the UK or US flag is less likely to confuse anyone than not using any flag, and that anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin.
The fact that any mapping from a language to a flag is to some extent arbitrary does not imply that no mapping at all is better. This sounds like a variation of the Sorites paradox.
Furthermore, I find it amusing that a website dedicated to languages, which are roughly sets of arbitrary conventions we use to communicate, is offended by the choice of another arbitrary convention to communicate.
You could define a complicated rule to make it less arbitrary, but then the choice of the rule itself would be arbitrary. I think the point that any mapping will be to some extent arbitrary is correct.
The problem for me is arguing that because any arbitrary convention will be offending or confusing to some, then no convention should be chosen. As opposed to the practical idea of just picking a convention that makes sense.
What flag would you suggest for http://als.wikipedia.org or http://pdc.wikipedia.org ?
Another example: a lot of people speak Russian outside of Russia. Many of them have nothing to do with Russia and never lived there, and even without the devastating war that Russia is currently waging against Ukraine they don't want to associate their language with Russia and its flag.
And of course England has its own flag, which is not the same as that of Great Britain. And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were formerly colonized/oppressed/etc. (take your pick) and might have a thing or two to say about having to deal with the British flag.
There are a lot more languages than countries. And language variations, dialects, etc. And a lot of flag / language combinations are confusing, insulting, historically incorrect, or not that helpful. Like the British, the French were all over the place and there are lots of places that speak French that don't use the French flag. Likewise Spanish is used all over the Americas. India has about 21 official languages (I think, might be more). One of which is English. So, it's complicated for English and it doesn't really get any better for other languages.
Telling people to grow a tougher skin isn't particularly user friendly or that helpful.
What about the fact that their language would be listed as "English", therefore reminding them it originated in England? Is listing the language as "English" significantly different from listing it as "<UK flag> English"? Should we rename the language to "Irish" ? Then what about the inhabitants of Ireland who don't identify as Irish?
You can always take the most offensive interpretation "This flag is claiming that Irish people are English, therefore contribute to historical oppression, etc".
But you can also take a more natural and charitable interpretation, which is that most people associate the UK flag to English, and the flag is therefore a convenient visual indication.
> it's complicated for English and it doesn't really get any better for other languages.
I agree, there is complexity and arbitrariness in any "language -> flag" mapping. I am arguing that you can make practical decisions even in the presence of complexity.
> Telling people to grow a tougher skin isn't particularly user friendly or that helpful.
Arguing you can't do something because someone will be offended is also not very helpful: you can almost always find some offensive interpretation of anything.
You mentioned the sorites paradox earlier. Do you think it could be applied here as well?
This is the "perfect is the enemy of good" fallacy. We may not be able to find something that is not offensive to anyone in the world, but we can pick a convention that doesn't actively force hundreds of millions of people to identify themselves with colonial powers that committed genocide against their ancestors.
If this sounds hyperbolic to you, I strongly recommend reading up on the history of English treatment of the Irish over the centuries. Then follow that by learning more about African colonization. This isn't just a matter of growing thicker skin, the intergenerational trauma these people feel is very very real.
> I strongly recommend reading up on the history of English treatment of the Irish over the centuries. Then follow that by learning more about African colonization.
We're not talking about some your-grandpa-defrauded-my-grandpa historical slight, we're talking about genocide systematically executed under the authority of that flag. The emotions experienced by these people are in the same category as those experienced by Jews when they see a swastika. If you don't see how that's a bigger deal than you're making it sound then I don't know how to help you.
This doesn't seem obvious to me. I don't think the word "English" is likely to confuse any English speaker.
> anyone offended by this needs to grow a tougher skin
Are you saying this with the personal experience of being from a country that now speaks the language of its colonizer?
And to be clear, the US is excluded from this. Our cultural memory of our colonial history is an outlier—for most Americans our sense of our relationship with Britain is more that of friendly rivals than colonizer-colonized. The difference is largely because most of us are descended from the colonists (or people who arrived much later), not from the people that were there first, so the abuses that our ancestors suffered barely even register on the scale of colonial abuse.
That contrasts sharply with how the Irish or most Africans feel towards their former colonial powers. It's hard to feel positively towards a flag that represents a power that repeatedly committed genocide against your people.
But being able to choose the language is always much better than sites forcing you to use a specific version of a site depending on your location, which is such a pain.
Side note: seeing the Taiwanese flag for traditional Chinese is kinda like the French flag in Switzerland for Hong Kong.
The French flag is a particular offender, with so many countries speaking French in Europe, Africa or Canada.
I kinda understand some of the arguments and sensitivities and some examples on the website are dumb but it's also dumb to deny that French language can't be associated with France. I bet people in Quebec and Niger can make the connection when they open the dropdown that this will be the language they speak.
Let's not lose the practical aspect of quick recognition. I know there might be 20+ languages spoken in Niger but they won't be on your run-of-the-mill eshop. The dropdown will have 10 options at most and the person in Niger can make the pick faster with the French flag. 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.
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.
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.
Yes, it originates in Italy, and it's named after a group that once occupied part of the area where France is now. They spoke Frankish, a language unrelated to French.
Interestingly, in Asia, the French are often referred to as "Franks", or rather by an interpretation of the word "Frank" in the sound system of the local language as it existed a few centuries ago.
Being pedantic is not practical for the UX of locale dropdowns. There are issues with flags. Franks being a Germanic tribe is not one of them.
Although maybe putting a Roman SPQR flag and Latin locale would save you some costs. With some effort it should be comprehensible by half of Europe.
I prefer all my UI in English, because it's easier to navigate settings. But i also hate when google tries to be smart and (poorly) auto translates the reviews in Maps from one of the languages I fluently speak, to English. I didn't find any way to separate those settings.
Also, i believe, Libre Office tries to deduce the monetary units from OS settings, and forces me to changes dollars to euros.
Just ask me what i want!
For some reason Google decides that I prefer Russian even if I am forcing it to use English (assuming that `?hl=en` switches the interface language): https://imgz.org/i36byD3g.png
This is useful early on to deliver their MVP and grab their first batch of users.
However, their assumption quickly falls apart when a significant subset of those users live in some region with their own regulations. Gambling/betting, invoicing, and payment processing are just a few examples.
If I see a flag icon next to a language, it's not worrying by itself, but it's a red flag about how things work under the hood. It's telling me that the company does not go the extra mile to build a realistic mental model that works for all users. And eventually, the product's limitations will impact some feature that is mission critical for my business.
Edit: I had a similar fight over the difference between time zones and time periods.
I think that symbols are useful in this case and that the number of potentially ambiguous/offensive situations is low enough that scrapping flags is worse overall.
Bathroom signs come to mind. Yes, not all men wear trousers, yes, not all women wear skirts, if you swing that way, perhaps not all men are men. Some of us don't even have legs. But you know what it means, it's standardised, and it saves us all a ton of time not having to do a double take at a clever bathroom door with an art project on it, in the same way that a flag in the corner of a webpage immediately draws the eye.
In some cases, a single flag indeed does not sufficiently describe an option. In this case, combine, like, two flags, e.g. (flag of Spain)(flag of Columbia), or invent some other clever icon to disambiguate selection.
I _highly_ doubt that being able to input the name of the language (or country or whatever), both in its native and translated form, is slower than scrolling through all possible icons.
I don't think I've ever seen that as a 'type in the language you want' option, only scrolling through options.
Also it might only have 5-10 options to begin with, since localization of a video game into a bunch of languages can be pretty expensive, especially if it's a text-heavy game.
Here's a funny example of where flags are useful:
People from Slovenia [SI] (natively "Slovenija") speak Slovene/Slovenian [sl], natively "Slovenščina", ajdective "slovensko".
People from Slovakia [SK] (natively "Slovensko") speak Slovak [sk], natively "Slovenčina", adjective "slovensky".
Opening up a language picker, I usually search for "slo" (if there even is a search bar!) and then read the options left. But since the difference can be as little as a single character, even without dyslexia and with good eyesight, I still screw it up sometimes. The flags however, even when small and/or blurry, can still be quite easily differentiated by anyone familiar with both.
At least not for me.
> The flags however, even when small and/or blurry, can still be quite easily differentiated by anyone familiar with both.
Well I'm actually living in Slovakia and _always_ use the difference between "Slovenščina/Slovinčina" and "Slovenčina/Slovenčina", because the flags are way more similar for me in their usual size than the names (the two carons make Slovene stand out more than the different coats of arms (a blue dot vs. a red dot) in the flags). Of course, in Slovak the difference between Slovinčina and Slovenčina is more of a problem when just looking at the names - that's when search comes in handy for me.
Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.
I absolutely love when websites randomly pick a language I can't read, which is not anywhere in my accept-languages (which does contain languages they do support), with a language selector hidden somewhere unspecified on the page. It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else.
That second paragraph is sarcastic, just in case.
But if you could read, you wouldn't consent to it...
I suppose browsers could/should add support for this use case, none of the major ones do as far as I know.
At the very least, I maintain that sites should use Accept-Language: as a default, absent any site-specific configuration that they offer. One of the huge things I hate about Google and a few other sites is that they deliberately ignore my Accept-Language: header and instead rely on IP-Geolocation. So if I'm traveling in another country, suddenly Google and those other sites change to a different language on me. Maddening.
By all means default to the Accept-Language header, but let me change it (and remember that choice)
And second, because many corporations conflate language with region, so they redirect me to the wrong country-specific site, or at least one useless to me compared to the global (which usually means US) one.
But they're not. Library computers exist. Shared office computers exist. Internet cafes exist. Let's call these "kiosk computers."
The optimal way to balance access needs here, IMHO, would be for either Operating Systems on kiosk computers, or maybe specifically browsers on kiosk computers, to offer a very quick, session-ephemeral toggle for what language the current user wants to see UI and content in.
(Probably, given that kiosk computers are almost always left on default settings of the OS, while personal computers are, well, personalized, such a toggle should be on by default, with users of personal computers expected to disable it.)
But until such a time as that ever happens, I would expect that websites will continue to simulate this thing the OS isn't offering.
I live in neither country, of course.
I recently tried to switch the locale of my work computer to en-GB, on a en-US distro and retaining the en-US keyboard layout.
The result is... unpleasant and some things (notably vSphere) just casually ignore both the user software settings (Firefox) and the OS settings.
Is there any standardization on which flag gets used for Arabic?
Anyway the flags don't necessarily make it any more confusing.
For example, China and Taiwan will disagree on what flag to show for the language they share.
Also, the article shows two different parts of the UI. For Monterey, it shows the UI for adding a language, for the older OS, that for adding a keyboard layout.
That UI still has ‘icons’ (a dark rounded rectangle with letters in it, for example “SQ” for “Albanian” or “USPC” for “US International – PC”) in Monterey.
Ideally a site's language selection menu button includes a globe icon so you can figure out where need to click to change the language, and a flag for quick identification.