Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flags Are Not Languages

flagsarenotlanguages.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 200 posts

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#81

Post by simondw »

ncclporterror wrote: post #69
jillesvangurp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person from Ireland that doesn't take well to being associated with the "Butcher's apron" as he refers to the flag of Great Britain. Ireland has its own flag and they are very proud of it. And they'll object to any suggestion that they are English. And of course England has its own flag, which is not the same as that of Great Britain. And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were…

> And of course quite a few countries still using English because they were formerly colonized/oppressed/etc. (take your pick) and might have a thing or two to say about having to deal with the British flag. What about the fact that their language would be listed as "English", therefore reminding them it originated in England? Is listing the language as "English" significantly different from listing it as " English"?…

> Arguing you can't do something because someone will be offended is also not very helpful: you can almost always find some offensive interpretation of anything

You mentioned the sorites paradox earlier. Do you think it could be applied here as well?

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#82

Post by sham1 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #73
JimDabell wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Ukrainian and Russian are different languages, that’s why I specified “a Russian-speaking Ukrainian”. Plenty of Ukrainians are native Russian speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine Speaking a language natively is not the same thing as nationality or allegiance to a flag, and it can be grossly offensive to confuse the two.

If you're a Russian speaking Ukrainian, you're speaking like the Russians, which is the sort of analogy I'm referring to.

While the Russian-speaking Ukrainians would indeed speak "like the Russians", I'd at least go off the limb and say that they'd probably prefer to have their native language in the UI represented as something like "Русский" instead of the Russian flag. Like if we were to ask a randomly picked Russian speaking Ukrainian like, say, Volodymyr Zelenskyy about how he'd feel about his native language being represented by the Russian flag, I could imagine him being sort of annoyed by that even if he'd probably understand the reason behind the choice.

-----

I feel that like many other people I'm this thread, it'd probably be better to have the language be represented as itself in the "Select language"-menu instead of relying on flags. It would be more accessible, allow for choosing different dialects of the same language, avoid faux pas like the aforementioned thing with Russian-speaking Ukrainiand, and so on. Of course you'd also want a translated name of the language in the UI which would correspond to the current UI language, but having the language there in its native form is a must.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#83

Post by david_allison »

quadhome wrote: post #8
peterhi wrote: post #4

But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语

Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages

* Use 文Ａ, and ensure you can navigate to the menu only via symbols

* The first element should be "use default/system language"

* Language names should be displayed untranslated: "Deutsch, English, français"

* Optionally display the language in the currently selected language

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#84

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

davedx wrote: post #6
James_K wrote: post #2

Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.

Only if the symbols make sense and there's a one-to-one relationship. This is a good move by Apple. Also, as a color blind person it is quite frustrating when people make content and use a flag emoji instead of a country name. Often mousing over doesn't work. Emojis are not semantic information.

I'll often paste flag emoji into the unicode program ( https://github.com/garabik/unicode ) to get the country code letters for flags I don't recognise.

It's pretty bad when people pick the wrong flag, because they don't know unicode, and are just looking at a tiny image on their phone screen.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#85

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

quadhome wrote: post #8
peterhi wrote: post #4

But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语

Wikipedia uses a “文Ａ” icon; IMHO far better than a flag. What flag would you expect to see? As for finding the language in the menu, listening a language in the foreign language seems like bad design too. The menu should list “English” as an option! See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/languages

I have also seen this icon on google translate, used to denote text. I wonder who came up with it first. Any time I've seen it, I have immediately guessed what it meant.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#86

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

RobotToaster wrote: post #39
ncclporterror wrote: post #30

The website argues that using a flag for a language may confuse or even offend users. It argues English would most appropriately be represented by the flag of England, but few people know the flag of England, so English is usually represented by the flag of the UK or the US, neither of which are appropriate because other languages are spoken in the UK and English does not originate from the US. I would argue that usi…

English is the official language of the United Kingdom, so their argument doesn't make sense.

The UK, like the US, doesn't have an official language. Though, constituent parts of it have given official standing to other languages.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#87

Post by morbicer »

jiehong wrote: post #60

I always thought they should be using the flag of the UN to indicate the location of a language selection dropdown, and just list the name of the languages in their native form in the list. But being able to choose the language is always much better than sites forcing you to use a specific version of a site depending on your location, which is such a pain. Side note: seeing the Taiwanese flag for traditional Chinese…

How do they call the language they speak? French? You know where the language originates and why is it called French?

I kinda understand some of the arguments and sensitivities and some examples on the website are dumb but it's also dumb to deny that French language can't be associated with France. I bet people in Quebec and Niger can make the connection when they open the dropdown that this will be the language they speak.

Let's not lose the practical aspect of quick recognition. I know there might be 20+ languages spoken in Niger but they won't be on your run-of-the-mill eshop. The dropdown will have 10 options at most and the person in Niger can make the pick faster with the French flag. The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#88

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

franga2000 wrote: post #61
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Icons help find things faster, [...] I _highly_ doubt that being able to input the name of the language (or country or whatever), both in its native and translated form, is slower than scrolling through all possible icons.

Typing the whole name takes longer and you don't always know exactly what to type, so you have to type a bit of the name, then look at the list. Flags help with the latter part. Here's a funny example of where flags are useful: People from Slovenia [SI] (natively "Slovenija") speak Slovene/Slovenian [sl], natively "Slovenščina", ajdective "slovensko". People from Slovakia [SK] (natively "Slovensko") speak Slovak [sk]…

> Typing the whole name takes longer[...]

At least not for me.

> The flags however, even when small and/or blurry, can still be quite easily differentiated by anyone familiar with both.

Well I'm actually living in Slovakia and _always_ use the difference between "Slovenščina/Slovinčina" and "Slovenčina/Slovenčina", because the flags are way more similar for me in their usual size than the names (the two carons make Slovene stand out more than the different coats of arms (a blue dot vs. a red dot) in the flags). Of course, in Slovak the difference between Slovinčina and Slovenčina is more of a problem when just looking at the names - that's when search comes in handy for me.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#89

Post by nkrisc »

a_random_canuck wrote: post #75
nkrisc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don’t know Chinese so I don’t know that is an arbitrary Chinese character with the Latin A for contrast. I’ve seen languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet occasionally intersperse Latin letters before so until I was told just now I assumed that this Chinese character with A had some significance in Chinese. So I don’t think it’s very effective at that.

Really? When I first saw it I understood it must have to do with changing languages.

Never struck me that way, though I can see it in retrospect. On the other hand, if I see a flag, I know that’s language settings.

In don’t know that using flags for language settings is more semantic, but it’s convention so I know what it means.

I’ve seen flags used to indicate language settings for as long as I’ve been using computers.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#90

Post by untech »

James_K wrote: post #2

Counterpoint to this website: it is convenient to have symbols to represent things. I don't see them suggesting anything better than flags.

Well, why not use currency symbols to represent language? Same amount of correctness.

If you like flags because they are colorful and memorable icons, you can use them to represent time zones. Much more convenient than some obscure "UTC+7" or "PT", isn’t it?

Post reply on HN