| From what I've read about it--by people who thought long and hard about this issue--the generally most accepted solution seems to be the Wikipedia way: use the name of the language as its written in in the language itself. The reason for the latter is that, say the site is originally presented in Russian, I don't know how "Dutch" is written in Russian so I couldn't pick it, but I do know what "Nederlands" means (FYI, that's the Dutch word for "Dutch", beats me why you English-speakers don't call it "Netherlandish", but each to their own I guess ;) which again demonstrates names of the same language in different languages can vary a lot). Though I suppose if you're really tight on space, ISO codes would probably also work. Note that Wikipedia itself is sometimes a rather extreme example; most websites/applications will only offer a choice between a small handful of languages. When the list of languages in the sidebar of Wikipedia is very long, it's not the most user-friendly method of selecting one. On the other hand, with flags that would be much worse, bordering on impossible (while the UK and US flags are pretty unique, there's a couple of flags that are very hard to distinguish from the flag of the Netherlands, for instance). I really wonder if there might be some creative better solution to language-selection than "the Wikipedia way", but I really want to stress that using country flags is not that solution, for a variety of usability reasons, political reasons and emotional reasons, most of which are probably outlined somewhere in this discussion so I won't repeat them all. I have to admit I have been guilty of using a German/Dutch/French flag for language selection on a website I developed many years ago--I didn't realize it was a bad idea back then (for instance, the flag of Belgium has the same colours as the flag of Germany in a different order, but they speak Dutch and French there, while the flag of France and the one of the Netherlands differ mainly by a 90 degrees rotation) (and the blues are subtly different, afaik). |