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by crazygringo 4989 days ago
For people saying "don't use flags", and "especially not for languages"...

I totally agree in theory, but...

In a lot of interfaces, having something visual helps a lot. Especially when you need to pick something from a list where you don't even know what language the user speaks!

Obviously, you can present a text list like "English (American)", "Português (Brasil)", "አማርኛ", "贛語", but it can look kind of ugly, how do you decide to sort them, etc.

Plus, a lot of times the language is tied to a country, because each country has their spelling and grammar differences, etc. That's why many times you don't see "Portuguese" in language lists, but rather "Portuguese (Portugal)" and "Portuguese (Brazil)" -- because there's no such thing as a general-purpose Portuguese.

So while flags aren't perfect, a lot of the time they help far more than they hurt. In a perfect world, there would actually be language-specific icons that everyone recognized. Suggestions, anybody?

3 comments

What flag do you suggest we use for es_US and fr_CA? Or how to distinguish de_CH and fr_CH?
Common practice seems to be using a half Swiss/half German flag for de_CH, and half Swiss/half French flag for fr_CH or just the Swiss flag for both languages.
If how to sort a text list is on your list of problems, you don't have a problem. As long as the order is consistent, users (in general) will be happy with it.
How is Esperanto classified?
Why would you not simply use the Esperanto flag?

http://flagspot.net/flags/qy-eo.html

Neat! I was not aware of it.