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Flags Are Not Languages

flagsarenotlanguages.com

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Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#111

Post by andylynch »

lolinder wrote: post #100
morbicer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic. By your logic I'm not sure why this is a conundrum—Saudi Arabia, of course! Arabic is actually the perfect example of why flags for languages are problematic—just because two countries share a language doesn't mean they're on good terms with each other. That's easy to see with Arabic because tensions in the Middle East are always in the news. You know i…

Even for English it’s problematic. Do you use the flag of the UK?, the USA?, England?

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#112

Post by msla »

jackvalentine wrote: post #24

I fairly often find myself deciding between flag of the United Kingdom or the flag of the United States of America as a choice for ‘English’ wondering will this just be different spelling or will there be some other ill effect of choosing the wrong one. I live in neither country, of course.

You could choose violence and use the Quebec flag for English because most people there speak English, right?

Is there any standardization on which flag gets used for Arabic?

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#113

Post by debugnik »

ryandrake wrote: post #101

At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.

First, because I want to switch away from badly translated content (or worse, badly machine translated content, cough cough Microsoft), even if I generally prefer it in my native tongue. I agree this should be a more accessible feature at the browser itself, maybe an extension.

And second, because many corporations conflate language with region, so they redirect me to the wrong country-specific site, or at least one useless to me compared to the global (which usually means US) one.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#114

Post by masklinn »

bjackman wrote: post #105
ryandrake wrote: post #101

At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.

I browse the web in multiple languages. I don't even know how to change my Accept-Language headers. I prefer to be able to just choose the language while I'm browsing. That also lets me easily see what languages the site actually offers.

I also browse the web in multiple languages. Accept-Language follows the language selection of the browser or OS (sadly Apple is kinda stupid so they only use the first language configured in system preferences, if you configure multiple languages in Firefox's preferences it actually follows that).

I absolutely love when websites randomly pick a language I can't read, which is not anywhere in my accept-languages (which does contain languages they do support), with a language selector hidden somewhere unspecified on the page. It's even better when I need to go through a cookie popup I can't bypass in that language I can't read without a language selector before I can do anything else.

That second paragraph is sarcastic, just in case.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#115

Post by ryandrake »

tpmoney wrote: post #107
ryandrake wrote: post #101

At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.

On the other hand, where is the UI in the browser to specify your language preference for each individual site? A person might have a general language preference, but might prefer to read particular sites in an alternate language, e.g. for practice learning a language. Firefox offers the option to specify an order of preferred languages globally, but as near as I can find, no way to specify on a per-site basis.

Interesting! I never considered the case you and the other replier brought up where people might want to browse different sites in different languages. Learned something new today, thank you!

I suppose browsers could/should add support for this use case, none of the major ones do as far as I know.

At the very least, I maintain that sites should use Accept-Language: as a default, absent any site-specific configuration that they offer. One of the huge things I hate about Google and a few other sites is that they deliberately ignore my Accept-Language: header and instead rely on IP-Geolocation. So if I'm traveling in another country, suddenly Google and those other sites change to a different language on me. Maddening.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#116

Post by lolinder »

andylynch wrote: post #111
lolinder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bigger conondrum might be which flag to choose for Arabic. By your logic I'm not sure why this is a conundrum—Saudi Arabia, of course! Arabic is actually the perfect example of why flags for languages are problematic—just because two countries share a language doesn't mean they're on good terms with each other. That's easy to see with Arabic because tensions in the Middle East are always in the news. You know i…

Even for English it’s problematic. Do you use the flag of the UK?, the USA?, England?

Yeah, definitely, but I find in this thread that using English as an example doesn't work because people will (from the perspective of someone in the US or UK) say that it's not a big deal to just pick a flag from a different country.

In the case of the UK and the USA—where we're at worst friendly rivals—this is a reasonable take, but you can't generalize our relationship to all of the other countries in the world that speak the language of former colonizers.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#117

Post by andylynch »

dgan wrote: post #94
jumasheff wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's annoying is that Google is forcing me to use some of its products in Russian which is offensive to me!

Explain? Why can't you use English for example?

Sometimes Google seems / seemed to decide its idea of your location should trump your browser or even account settings. At one point our (Swiss, in England) office often had Google.com deciding we should be reading in Polish. Never really understood why.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#118

Post by derefr »

ryandrake wrote: post #101

At least on the web, you shouldn't even be using your web UI to change the language in the first place! Browsers already send Accept-Language: headers. Just use that. Why complicate your UI? It's at best redundant and at worst annoying when a web site chooses to ignore my preference and rolls its own.

This would be fine if all computers were guaranteed to be personal computers that know their current user's preferences.

But they're not. Library computers exist. Shared office computers exist. Internet cafes exist. Let's call these "kiosk computers."

The optimal way to balance access needs here, IMHO, would be for either Operating Systems on kiosk computers, or maybe specifically browsers on kiosk computers, to offer a very quick, session-ephemeral toggle for what language the current user wants to see UI and content in.

(Probably, given that kiosk computers are almost always left on default settings of the OS, while personal computers are, well, personalized, such a toggle should be on by default, with users of personal computers expected to disable it.)

But until such a time as that ever happens, I would expect that websites will continue to simulate this thing the OS isn't offering.

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#119

Post by derefr »

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.

People have proposed "language flags" before.

In fact, Wikipedia even uses/maintains a set of them for Wiktionary entries (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Language_flags_lis...) — although I've never personally noticed them in use in Wiktionary. (Does anyone have an example of a Wiktionary page that embeds one of these?)

Re: Flags Are Not Languages

#120

Post by [deleted] »

andrewshadura wrote: post #56
bsza wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn’t. You presumably live in a country. That country has a flag. If you click that flag, there is a high chance you’ll get a language you understand - and if you don’t, you probably already know the reason and how to fix it (diaspora, multi-lingual country etc.). A few easy-to-address edge cases are no basis to fuck up everyone else’s experience.

I speak Russian, I don't live in Russia. Never have, never was a citizen of. Why the hell do I have to select the flag of Russia if I want to use something in Russian?

[deleted]
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