Flags are not languages
Ten years ago, I got my first job in the field of languages. I was a "translation engineer", working on tooling for translators. I very quickly was told to never represent a language by a flag.
I'm sharing this here because this is something you either know, or don't, and many people don't.
Why is simple: languages do not map 1:1 to a country.
- A country can have multiple languages
- A language can be spoken in multiple countries
- A language can exist without being spoken in any country
- A country can exist without an officially recognised language
Today as I sit here, I'm at a language meetup where language tables each have a flag on them. Well, none of us at the Russian table are comfortable with that Russian flag, so we just turn it around and write "RU" on the other side.
Wikipedia has an article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages
So how are you supposed to do this correctly ? ISO 639 has a list of 2-letter and 3-letter codes for languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
- You want to represent a language, use ISO 639-1: a two letter code. For example, "English" is "en" and "French" is "fr".
- You want to represent a language, but wish for a larger code for some reason (such as disambiguation with state or country codes)? You can use ISO 639-2/T: 3-letter codes for the languages. For example,
"English" is "eng" and "French" is "fra". - You want to represent a language, as spoken in a particular country? ISO 639 and ISO 3166 work together. You can represent "English as spoken in England" as "en_GB", "American English" as "en_US", "Canadian French" as "fr_CA", and so on. (This is a very flexible standard, allowing for a lot of variations and a topic for a more motivated person than me. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag)
- You want to represent the abstract notion of translations or internationalization, such as for an icon to change the language? This wikipedia article may help. The two most common variations I've seen are an icon that has "A" and "文" together, or some kind of globe icon.
- You want to represent a currency? Use ISO 4217 currency codes: "USD" for US Dollar, etc. Some countries have multiple currencies, don't use a flag without disambiguating somewhere.
- You want to represent a country? You can use a flag, I don't care. But even then, ISO 3166 will probably be less political :)
Great post, and something I'd never thought about very much!
You can use a globe/文 for the abstraction of switching languages, but I think there's still a case for a graphical representation of specific languages.
You could have flags for languages like this vexillology post. Those might never take off, but you could piggyback knowledge of national flags and their associated languages by adding some modifier of national flag(s) (stitched together, if there's more than one) most associated with a language, like four corners for Canadian/U.S./GB/Australia with a superimposed globe? Or a tongue.
Not really an area I know about, but the benefits of icons that come to mind are:
I was curious about pidgin languages like Hawaiian pidgin, which gets you into ISO 639-3, along with traditional Hawaiian (missing from the other ISO 639?), creole, and two types of sign language.
Flags solve the problem of making languages identifiable in a list regardless of what language(s) the user speaks. Unfortunately I can't think of an alternative that meets this requirement without the unfortunate ambiguity certain flags present.
With full language names, you have to choose between presenting the exonyms or endonyms. Or, you can present both, which then raises the question of how to sort them. Finding the right language in Handbrake's track selection UI can be a real hassle because it only presents endonyms, and the list of languages is enormous.
ISO language codes are probably the best compromise, but they have the problem of relying on the English alphabet, and the codes are basically abbreviations of their English exonyms. This sure would make my life easier in the above Handbrake example, but people unfamiliar with either the English alphabet or the English exonym for their language would probably get confused.
Personally, I am of the mindset that when a problem is difficult for a computer to solve, we should alter the parameters until it becomes easy. To this end, I propose we require all countries to choose a single official language, based on which language is the most widely spoken within their borders. To further simplify things, all countries that speak a given language will then be merged into a single geopolitical entity. The combined nation of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will henceforth be known as Anglospheria.