[delroth]

They do make sense for many users, and they are the closest you can find to a proper graphical representation of languages. When I add a language that I know to be official in several countries, I look at my analytics to see where most users come from and use the flag from their country. I can't remember a time where it did not also match the country with the most speakers.

[yepguy]

It's a common enough practice that most people usually know what it means, but there's a reason you don't see flags on Wikipedia, Facebook, or Youtube. Languages are spoken in many countries, and countries are multilingual. There are quite a few articles around the web on this topic, but that's basically what they boil down to: languages are not countries. Some users may be confused or offended that their flag is not represented.

[nfoz]

And as a Canadian I find it generally a little weird that the Canadian flag often means Canadian French, and I have to click the US flag to get English (which is of course a slightly different English than Canadian English which is probably unavailable).

I guess it's something like "language most unique to that country", no but that's not right either... I don't know.