Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
How many flags would you use for Spanish? French?
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?