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Comment by hiccuphippo | Hacker News Reader

Should there be emojis to represent languages? Maybe it could be a new group. I'd rather not use the flag shape, maybe a circle with the 2 letter code and a background with the colors from the flag usually used to represent that language, mainly because people is already used to scan the lists looking for those colors.

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It would be great if there were. I decided to see if such a thing existed and came across the Flag icons for languages page[1]. There is an absolutely hideous French, Belgium, Canadian mix flag so the bar for language emojis is very very low. In other words, it should be easy to do better.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

no, cause nobody would understand them. Words exist, and websites that needs to show a lot of languages (google translate, deepl, wikipedia etc) just show you a list of names. It's really the easiest solution, cause people are _also_ really used to scanning text for their own language.

I really wish there were. It'd make things a lot easier for me!

There aren't really existing unambiguous language icons, at least for the majority of languages, so it'd be less about making them a formal emoji and more about actually inventing + "legitimising" new icons so they can be broadly and uncontroversially used.

I doubt that'd happen in practice - there just isn't a pressing need, and you'd need an enormous (and likely controversial) public education campaign to make them adoptable - but it would be a neat design problem. r/vexillogy would have a field day.

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