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Comment by jiehong | Hacker News Reader

I always thought they should be using the flag of the UN to indicate the location of a language selection dropdown, and just list the name of the languages in their native form in the list.

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.

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How do they call the language they speak? French? You know where the language originates and why is it called French?

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.

> 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.

Even for English it’s problematic. Do you use the flag of the UK?, the USA?, England?

Yeah, definitely, but I find in this thread that using English as an example doesn't work because people will (from the perspective of someone in the US or UK) say that it's not a big deal to just pick a flag from a different country.

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.

I feel the colonial resentments and I am not a yeehaa proponent of flags.

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.

> You know where the language originates and why is it called French?

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.

Well aktschually... you can then say it originates somewhere in India or rather Pontic-Caspian steppe. The Italian version of Vulgar Latin is called Italian.

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.

Hong Kong people speak Cantonese, and there is no "Canton" flag. (Hong Kong does have its own flag, but sometimes people want to show only "country-level" flags and well...)

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