Flags Are Not Languages

There's a whole website dedicated to this complaint: https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/

Your site is great (and minimalist) -- honestly, really really very good job. One note: in general there's a UX recommendation not to use flags when you mean languages. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/ I'm not exactly sure the best way to solve this for your blog. Maybe something like adding alt-text to indicate "German Language" and adding a parenthetical to the end of titles "(German)" or something?

Please don't. Flags are not languages. (http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/) There are many languages which cannot be clearly distinguished with a flag icon -- for example, there are dozens of languages which could be represented by an Indian flag (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Urdu...), and some languages which don't have any clear flag, or whose flag could be politically complicated to display (like Catalan, Romani, or Tibetan). Use the localized name of a language to indicate the language (e.g. English, Español, Svenska, 中文). It's unambiguous and takes very little effort to implement.

This is nice. Though it’s worth pointing out to UX folks that flags are not languages. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-la…

Using flags for language isn't really a great pattern. It kind of works if you only support a few languages, but when you support a lot you get into tough issues where many flags relate to a single language and many languages relate to a single flag. http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-la…

The flag doesn't work for the billion people of India. We are massively multilingual; we have 22 official languages. Google.co.in is offered in 9 of those 22 languages -- each one with its own unique script, which are mutually un-intelligible. One Indian flag for all languages? No, thanks. Look at the confusion caused by the Metropolitan Police website [1]. If you can afford two pop-up lists, the approach of Lufthansa is the best [2]. If you want just one list, follow the installation screen of Ubuntu -- they write out the name of the language in its own script. [1]: http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/2011/09/the-metropolitan-police-1… [2]: http://www.lufthansa.com/de/en/pre-homepage?command=cc&lang=en

I think this is brilliant and something that more websites should be using, especially instead of the nonsense flags. http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/

Some software and websites show (or showed) a little country flag for each language. For example, German would get the flag of Germany. Don't do this. It is flawed for so many reasons... Here's a whole blog about this, by someone who cares about it more than me: https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/

Flags are not languages: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-la… Arguably it makes a little more sense for keyboard layouts, but even then. Edit: also with alternative layouts. Is Dvorak English? If you want you can create your own keyboard layout with Ukulele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ (or edit an existing one) and change the icon to any image.

> Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages There's even a website for this issue http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-la…

In fact, the first external link in TFA is to a whole website [http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-la… apparently dedicated to this.

Please don't use flags for disambiguating languages. (http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-langua… is a starting point. Basically - some languages are spoken in more than one country (eg. English in US, Britain, Australia, India) - some countries have more than one language spoken in them (eg. see any large country) - you will end up accidentally annoying people when you accidentally get it wrong. (is Cantonese, Tibetan and Mongolian the same language as Mandarin? You realise they are not mutually intelligible and come from different language families?) I suggest you write the language name in the language itself. If you desperately need something short use the Unicode language codes. Edit: Really like it. Definitely continue.