Meryl's Notes Blog
Things wordy, geeky, and webbyFlags as a Representative for a Language
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 11:09 AM | 6 commentsSome sites use flags to represent a language thinking visitors will click the flag that represents their langauge to view the site in that language. Well, do you use Mexico’s flag or Spain’s flag to represent Spanish? I don’t recall seeing a site using both flags.
What about English? Some sites use the British flag and no American flag, so I select the British flag. But, not everyone knows what the British flag looks like or that flag’s primary language is English. Aside from that, British and American English have differences. Other languages also have regional differences.
Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult? argues several points on the poor use of flags as a representation of language. My suggestion is to list the languages in their own language. A Spanish site would use “English” rather than “Ingles” to indicate the English version of the site. An English site, in turn, would use “español” instead of “Spanish.” I don’t know what the translation of English is in most languages, and I am sure most people don’t know the translation of their own language in other languages.
Like my tennis coach always says when referencing a simple stroke that turns into a nightmare: “We make things more complicated.” Keep it simple and reference the other languages your site has by using the name of the language in its native form.
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6 comments
I agree with you SO much on this subject. I’m working with game development and every time we get to the design of the language selection screen I have to mention that we should NOT use flags. Often we end up using flags anyway…
Here in Switzerland people normally speak German, French and Italian, but they have to select what COUNTRY and not what language they use.
About writing the language in the native language (So Dansk for Danish…) also agree with this one. As recent as yesterday I had an issue, I was registering a product on Apple.com and for some reason the site suddenly switched to French (I’m in Switzerland so maybe they just assume all here can read French.. but I’m actually Danish..). I had the change to change language, except it took a while before I knew it as there was a pull down menu with some selections that I couldn’t read as they where all in French, thanks.. Then I realized it and got it sorted.
Great to see that other people share the same view on this.
Thanks for your insightful comments, Sam. I love your point regarding Apple and the site serving you French pages. I wonder if this is an issue in Canada since some parts are primarily French while others are English.
I disagee totally, flags are the only eye catching way commonly agreed upon to denote a language, just show me a commercial site that wants to risk the 5 second attention span of a visitor before they conclude their language is not supported and leave.
The political social arguments are inane.
If you are American then like it or not your language evolved on a little Island near Europe. The language is not American it is English - that is its name and the UK is its origin. Same with Spanish.
Political correctness gone wrong - worst case is attempt to combine USA and English flags - what about the Australians? It is better to be “unfair” to the US and therefore fair to Australia and NZ rather than an attempt at correctness that actually leaves AU and NZ feeling even more unfairly treated - at least if its the Union Jack then everyone knows their historical linguistic roots (or should do) and should not feel offended. If you dont like the origin of your language, if colonial history (and that is ALL it is - just history) upsets you then invent your own language and put your flag on it. Otherwise except that it is an imperfect world, text does not work as well as graphics for attention deficient teenagers and also does anyone really believe we can invent an alternate graphical system that will be easy to teach throughout the world.
Most things these days are USA centric, personally I dont think it hurts to have something where America is not “number one”.
PS I am a software developer and appreciate all the technical arguments but they are naive - it is a nightmare
scenario to try and educate the entire world to some new system so dont bother it wont work.
Merly is right about discouraging the use of flag as symbol for languages. Looking at Jons comment itself proves how complicated things can get.. Korean is spoken in both north and south korea, but why choose just a south korean flag ? (note: there is no land of origin here) and in many countries more then 1 dominant languages are present. Moreover there are languages which cannot be represented as a country, for example, tamil is a major language spoken in the South Asian sub-continent, but has not country representing it, since its origin is in India, which as a different National Language … In conclusion I feel all this representation of flag as a symbol of language is a crap !!
Jon, attention deficient teenagers in Latin America probably don’t know the flag from Spain.
I agree with Jon, arguing that a flag can offend a reader is stupid (responding to the Korpela’s stupid article). Clicking over a flag is not a sign of submission to an specific country or king.
The flag reflects the country where the language BORN. Nothing else.
If someone doesn’t know the mother country of a language or its flag, it is a great opportunity to LEARN, because the flag usually is complemented with a text next to it or a tooltip.
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