[JonRB]

I experienced this a lot while growing up in a country with ~4 national languages - I spoke one of them well, but sadly only about 20% of the population speak it, so most websites will default to using the bigger national language (~70% pop) regardless of what your computer is set to.

It's really not that hard to find the language switcher on most websites, but it's still a bit annoying.

[1bc29b36f623ba8]

Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I especially despise when sites force me to manually select another country from a list, in order to get an interface in my native language.

The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.

[Spivak]

Ahh the “is it the US or British flag next to English” problem.

I’m genuinely surprised that there’s not a falsehoods article that includes things like:

* The mapping between languages and countries is 1-1.

* Every language has a mother single mother country.

* “English” refers to a single language.

* “US English” is good enough for all English speakers.

* US English is well defined and refers to a single language.

* You can partition a map into areas for which there is a single reasonable default language.

And so on.

[JimDabell]

It (long) predates "falsehoods" style articles, but this article is pretty commonly cited: http://jkorpela.fi/flags.html

[Dylan16807]

That article is more about aesthetics than anything.

Also:

> There is a perfect symbol for any language which you can use on the Web: the name of the language in the language itself, such as English (or British English or US English, if needed). Be careful with the grammatically correct use of upper and lower case here! If a reader doesn't know the name of language X in X, he probably does not know X enough for the link to be of use to him.

So now that I'm on this Korean site, with no idea how "Korean" looks in Korean, how am I supposed to find the language picker?

[ronsor]

I believe you misunderstood the author.

He is not saying to use the current language's hame for the language picker's icon (I would use a globe, personally), but instead to use the language's name in the list.

For example:

    [GLOBE]
    >English
    >日本語

[umanwizard]

> * “English” refers to a single language.

>

> * “US English” is good enough for all English speakers.

>

> * US English is well defined and refers to a single language.

There are certainly pretty extreme differences in spoken language, especially in the UK with its vast collection of local dialects, or in places where English is on a continuum with a creole language (Jamaica, Liberia, etc.)

But I would have thought that any regional variety of written English could be readily easily understood by most functionally literate speakers. I can browse English-language newspapers from the US, UK, Jamaica, India, and the Philippines and understand everything or nearly so. Is my assumption incorrect?

Anyway, I'd add another falsehood to your list:

* People prefer to consume content in their native language.

I think most bilingual people would prefer to read original content in their non-dominant language than a (poorly) translated version in their native language.

[Dylan16807]

If you're going to use definition of 'language' so narrow that languages effectively don't exist, your article is not going to be useful. Kinda want the falsehoods to actually be false, you know?

[1bc29b36f623ba8]

Pretty much, yes. But the situation is even more messed up here in Europe and I am especially happy that I'm not a native German speaker.

It would cause a bunch of other problems, of course, but it would be nice if we could just have a bunch of languages with an EU flag next to them. At least from an UI perspective. :D

[rangibaby]

I remember Spybot used the actual flag of England!

[jaflo]

Switzerland?

[JonRB]

Yep! I grew up in French-speaking Switzerland.