The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country.
Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF.
People using national flags to (imprecisely/incorrectly) represent languages is really not the fault of national flags, though.
Longhanks 1 days ago [-]
Also, transgender is not a country. The flags don't necessarily represent countries.
walthamstow 1 days ago [-]
Nor is England, if we're being honest with ourselves
pwdisswordfishz 15 hours ago [-]
What is England, then?
walthamstow 15 hours ago [-]
A subdivision of the United Kingdom, like Virginia is of the United States.
rand0m4r 10 hours ago [-]
If France is bacon, maybe England is a sausage /s
croisillon 1 days ago [-]
i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch
spoiler 1 days ago [-]
Not trying to be funny or anything, but you just typed the 文A thing!
With some CSS you can make it indistinguishable from an icon
croisillon 1 days ago [-]
no, that's a good point but it would need some recognition, a name etc
dewey 1 days ago [-]
I always find that very confusing, every time I see that in the mobile app (where it's featured pretty prominently) I'm still searching where I can see the other language version before I realize that's the symbol for it.
I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.
graypegg 1 days ago [-]
I do feel like it's made slightly more clear if it's stylized like
文<-->A
Sorry for the poor attempt at ascii art. But I've seen some arrow indicating swapping/matching between the two characters. And the choice of characters does cover a huge swath of people on earth. (文 for zh_* + jp, and A for every latin, cyrillic and greek alphabet language) Of course that's still missing a huge chunk of people concerned that it might just swap between two languages not including theirs, but as a universal symbol for "translation" it's probably a good bet that the reader recognizes them as "being related to languages" at minimum since they have most certainly interacted with one of those language groups before.
RunningDroid 1 days ago [-]
文↔A
Unicodified version, some fonts don't render it nice though
Haha thanks! I was thinking HN would remove it like it does with emoji, good to know the arrows codepage works!
culi 2 days ago [-]
Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide.
And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)
est 1 days ago [-]
sorry but there's no "Cantonese text", both Cantonese and Mandarin are written in Chinese.
It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode.
(yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)
demetrius 13 hours ago [-]
> It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode.
Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak.
Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak.
> because the orthography movement failed in the 70s
It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”.
For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading.
They're just different words¹.
____
¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.
culi 1 days ago [-]
Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages
1 days ago [-]
nottorp 14 hours ago [-]
Does a dropdown with flag emojis support searching from the keyboard?
It's really annoying when they give you a loong list of countries or languages and you have to scroll through it until you get two pages past the target, then scroll back slowly until you get to one page before the target, repeat until you finally have it in sight...
eviks 2 days ago [-]
Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?
Doxin 2 days ago [-]
I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL uses way more words with french roots than nl-BE for example.
What I tend to do is have a dropdown with a country icon and language name localized to that language for each language. My pet peeve is trying to switch a website from a language I don't speak into one I do speak and the dropdown listing "Dutch" as "Néerlandais" or whatever instead of "Nederlands". I don't speak french, why would I know what dutch is called in french?
eviks 2 days ago [-]
You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well.
(and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)
wongarsu 1 days ago [-]
As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries.
Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.
weinzierl 8 hours ago [-]
I think the language/dialect distinction is not even helpful - all that counts is what people understand.
As a native German speaker, who never learnt Dutch, I can tell you that I understand nl-NL a lot better than de-CH. There is a reason de-CH is subtiteled in German media.
Tomte 1 days ago [-]
> As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy
So if your criterium breaks down, you would agree that you can't map every single language/dialect to a country in a neat fr-BE scheme?
psychoslave 7 hours ago [-]
Obviously no, 26² makes 676, and number of languages in the world is estimated to be around 4000 and 8000. Given that 26³ is 17576, you would probably start to have something vast enough with scheme like ab-cd-ef.
mappu 18 hours ago [-]
The example given is de-CH and lb-LU - a counterexample for the neat scheme would require separate dialects of the same language within a single country e.g. 近畿方言.
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
Politicians are the ones still trying to draw arbitrary lines based on language. Linguists have largely threw in the towel on this quite some time ago.
psychoslave 2 days ago [-]
No, I don’t.
I do think it might be conceptually possible and intellectually funny to come with flags that are generated from some pattern that some corpus of languages exhibit. Be it sui generis through some LLM, or relying more on scholar lexical/syntactic categorizations, or even something really more trivial like using a language-code[1] as entry.
On the other hand, with such an approach I’m afraid that chances are low that we can gain any adherence and a large recognition of the resulting flags from their speakers.
To my mind the best approaches as of today where already exposed in this thread: something best effort to propose the most likely user recognizable language and a clearly visible option to open a locale selector. If iconography seems a must have in the UI, showing something like a A/あ icon is rather usual by now.
no, and they don't need to. a list is fine, you can include the name of the language (localized), a specifier if there are variants of the language, and even the language name and variant localized in itself. Sure, "Español (República Dominicana) - Spanish (Dominican Republic)" might be a bit long but it's still way easier fitting it into a picker than trying to come up with an icon for it.
eviks 20 hours ago [-]
No, it's not only not easy, it's impossible to fit into your tray icon
psychoslave 9 hours ago [-]
Sure but you don’t fill the tray stack with all country flags either, do you?
You need just one icon to open the locale selector, and possibly an other one giving feedback of which one is currently applied. For the latter using a language code looks like a realistic option:
EN
US
FR
BE
hunter2_ 2 days ago [-]
> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text
This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false positive all of a sudden.
Chrome could at least expose support like other feature detection APIs, even if they don't go so far as to provide the flags, to avoid this ridiculous heuristic approach.
Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer.
wongarsu 1 days ago [-]
Unicode's mission is to be able to represent all written text. Once you decide that flags should be part of that you kind of have to include all of them. Including a flag in Unicode isn't a statement that you believe that this country exists, it's a statement that you think there are people who use this flag in written communication.
Someone 15 hours ago [-]
> Unicode's mission is to be able to represent all written text. Once you decide that flags should be part of that you kind of have to include all of them.
Unicode has decided flags shouldn’t be part of Unicode.
There are a few flag emoji that got included before they reached that decision and there are “regional indicator symbols” that often get displayed as flags, but that’s it. They won’t, for example, include flags of cantons of Liechtenstein.
That would be actual work. Instead they justify their existence by adding more poop emojis in various shades of brown and yellow...
account42 10 hours ago [-]
A golden poop emoji would be more useful than things like skin tones are flags to display your mental issues.
hunter2_ 1 days ago [-]
Regardless of what the upstream rebuttal is (i.e., Unicode's mission as you explained), I think it makes sense for the downstream entity (i.e., Windows) to simply indicate inheritance from upstream as a rebuttal to any pressure.
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't matter what you think the statement is. What matters is what the governments around the world, and specifically in places where you're selling your products, think it implies.
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.
I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized.
Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?
lifthrasiir 2 days ago [-]
Subtags are derived from ISO 3166-2, so you want to contact its maintenance agency.
andreareina 2 days ago [-]
IIRC someone else started it by applying a ligature to the appropriate regional indicator pairs, then Unicode adopted it.
WorldMaker 1 days ago [-]
> Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer.
Flags are Political Symbols. ISO Country Codes are not. People rally around flags. Flag color symbolize beliefs/ideals. Flag crests and images contain political messages. ISO Country Codes are just a couple of letters that might (but not necessarily do) reflect a Country Name.
It's generally not just "don't want the country acknowledged", it's "don't want dissidents rallying to that flag". For instance, the parts of China that believe Taiwan is and always shall be a part of China don't have a problem with naming Taiwan as such, they see that as the "province name"; they do have a problem with the national flag of Taiwan, which intentionally represents and symbolizes its independence from China.
I can't blame Microsoft for not wanting to support flags. Politics are hard. Flags can be the hard mode of Political Symbols.
(Also Microsoft's stance is interesting in the way that it came from that Windows 95-era map-based Time Zone picker. The number of lawsuits they had over effectively "single pixel" border disputes was absurd. Flags are way more political than borders.)
themacguffinman 1 days ago [-]
I can blame Microsoft. Every other tech company and OS figured out how to make it work and they're not exactly buckling under the weight of legal or political pressure on the matter of flags.
WorldMaker 1 days ago [-]
If you had the choice between "no lawsuits at all" and "lawsuits in random months by random countries for things that can escalate to violence and wars" you wouldn't take "no lawsuits at all"?
Even if very few of the lawsuits actually escalate to violence or war, is any risk of violence/war worth it? Ethics would suggest "all my competitors are doing it" isn't a great answer here, either, and certainly doesn't remove the risk.
I can respect the "no lawsuits at all" preference here.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
Ethics don't dictate that you preemptively submit to the demands of bullies just in case they might do something bad if you don't.
WorldMaker 8 hours ago [-]
Not playing the game at all is very different from playing the game according to the demands and rules of bullies. The only way to win is not to play, just ask WOPR.
hunter2_ 1 days ago [-]
It's a bit confusing that folks who consider Taiwan a province and not a country wouldn't take issue (or at least see it as a minor issue relative to the presence of a flag) with it being included among ISO country codes. In other words, if Microsoft were to be walking on eggshells enough to omit flags wholesale, I'm surprised they don't also omit all things that enumerate ISO country codes.
I see your point that flags elicit a different reaction out of people than territorial classifications, but simultaneously it seems to be the classification which elicits disagreement. "You can call it a country so long as you don't assign a flag" seems like the wrong place to draw a line in the sand.
Presumably, provinces can have flags!!
WorldMaker 1 days ago [-]
In this case, Microsoft also isn't saying "this is an ISO country code", it's just outputting the letters embedded in the ZWJ sequence as worst case fallback letters in an intentionally ugly fallback font block. Those letters come from ISO country codes in working flag emoji, but Microsoft's approach is "dumb passthrough", Microsoft isn't making any political decisions or validating the ISO country codes are actually ISO country codes or anything, it's just outputting "raw data" from the emoji contents itself.
Windows also doesn't have an "ISO Country Code Picker" here. They don't provide tools to make flag emoji at all.
2 days ago [-]
josephcsible 2 days ago [-]
I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.
GuB-42 2 days ago [-]
My idea is that an app should do its best to work with the OS and not override defaults, that includes system fonts. It is good for consistency, accessibility, etc... If Windows doesn't ship with flag emoji, or any character for that matter, that shouldn't be Chrome's problem.
Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.
echoangle 1 days ago [-]
By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.
GuB-42 1 days ago [-]
Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.
I'm not GP, but yes, IMO browsers shouldn't override the OS trust store (and shouldn't ship their own flag emojis).
You are a web browser, not an operating system. Stay in your lane.
pkasting 2 days ago [-]
A 1.4MB binary size cost is massive. I'm a chrome developer and our threshold for what you need to explain the cost/benefit of is 16KB.
To me this just isn't worth the cost.
skrebbel 2 days ago [-]
Fwiw just the country flags are 77kb if you use the Twemoji ones like Firefox does. Fancy shiny ones area bit bigger I suspect.
pkasting 1 days ago [-]
Interesting. That's a lot more plausible. Reopened the bug.
skrebbel 1 days ago [-]
Wow cool!
Sidenote, I'm the maintainer of the polyfill for this and its little script that extracts just the country flags from Mozilla's Twemoji font [0]. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but if it's in any way helpful that I chime into that Chromium bug then let me know. I'd love to deprecate the polyfill.
But this just means that numerous websites are going to offer different versions of that same 1.4Mb download to make it work for themselves.
2 days ago [-]
awiesenhofer 1 days ago [-]
Sorry, but a Chrome developer complaining about 1.4MB being too "massive" is just the funniest thing ever! xD
zamadatix 1 days ago [-]
The entire offline installer of over 15 years worth of features is 120 MB for Windows, it's quite impressive really considering the amount of features that includes. If they took the typical approach of web pages run in Chrome that might be multiple GB by now.
shultays 1 days ago [-]
google.com homepage
59 requests 1.2 MB transferred 3.1 MB resources
lifthrasiir 2 days ago [-]
Noto Color Emoji weighs more than 20 MB, which makes it difficult to embed to the browser. I think that's mainly due to the embedded PNGs so it would be technically possible to get rid of them and use vector fonts for special occasions, though. (In fact, I believe Firefox did so with its built-in Twemoji.)
lern_too_spel 2 days ago [-]
They just need the flag glyphs, not everything else.
lifthrasiir 2 days ago [-]
Those flag glyphs still have to be harmonized with other emoji glyphs anyway, so including all of them is the safest approach.
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
That's not essential. Plain looking flags are still better in all cases than large letters.
0x073 2 days ago [-]
Firefox has an custom cert management.
Chrome relies on the os certs.
I think that's the correct way how software should works.
ziddoap 1 days ago [-]
Chrome runs a root program, and has for a few years.
>Standardizing the set of CAs trusted by Chrome across platforms through the transition to the Chrome Root Store, coupled with a consistent certificate verification experience through the use of the Chrome Certificate Verifier, will result in more consistent user and developer experiences.
> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text
Wait. I thought Windows has ClearType which could render black text on white background using colors. And furthermore there is a wizard to allow users to adjust how much ClearType adjustment there is. This feels like a totally incorrect solution.
And apparently starting from 2021 Microsoft Edge did in fact begin to use ClearText according to this article https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-fon... from Microsoft. So the author's approach would be broken in Microsoft Edge since 2021.
tobr 2 days ago [-]
The polyfill mentioned and linked in the article has a cleverer solution. It attempts to render the same flag emoji in two different text colors and checks if they end up being the same color or not (same color = probably a color glyph, ie an emoji).
(I'm the author of the polyfill, though note that all this code is pieced together from existing other libs with irrelevant parts removed; none of the good ideas are mine)
Just randomly sharing, the part of the trick I like the most is that it renders the emojis scaled down to a 1x1 canvas, so it renders just a single pixel. That makes checking stuff like "am i not accidentally reading in the transparent area of the glyph" and stuff like that no problem, because the whole emoji is blurred down to a single pixel.
The author's example is a bit weird in this regard, it does the same trick (set the canvas width and height to 1), and then it still loops through all 1 pixels and discards any transparent ones.
MatmaRex 2 days ago [-]
You're right, but the author's approach still works by accident, because ClearType is disabled when drawing text to canvas. I am not sure why that's the case, but I would guess it's because the subpixel colors can only be computed correctly when the background color is known (and static), and with a canvas, the background can be drawn later or animated. ClearType is only enabled for normal text on the page, and many CSS properties incidentally disable it presumably for similar reasons (e.g. 'will-change: opacity;').
Jotalea 2 days ago [-]
> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual.
This is so real.
sureIy 2 days ago [-]
I hold the belief that if you ask it something that nobody has documented before it just won't do it. This also and particularly applies to code.
Ask about Fibonacci? Great.
Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
There are hundreds of resources for a Google search for "emoji flags Windows".
nomel 1 days ago [-]
Worse, the statistically frequent fibonacci-type problems are attractors in the latest space. If you ever get near them then snap, they'll degrade whatever answer you get that's not actually related, and it'll start throwing in fibonacci concepts into your non-fibonacci code.
DaiPlusPlus 1 days ago [-]
It’s oddly good at converting imperative C to Haskell, though.
1f60c 1 days ago [-]
Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility.
Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
nottorp 14 hours ago [-]
> Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility.
Not everyone has the time or the inclination to keep a stable of local llms (and update them regularly, for example). Some people have other hobbies.
> Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
What? It's been years since a regular search got you anything but spam from the usual tutorial farms.
1f60c 10 hours ago [-]
Wait really? Are you saying this Google search[0] returns no useful results at all?
The prompt I used isn't a particularly good search query, and I got:
* A Stack Overflow question about this issue with a proposed solution;
* A Reddit thread offering a workaround to non-technical users;
* This thread on HN (which OP of course couldn't have seen, but anyway);
* OP's article;
* A blog post about OP's article;
* A blog post with an elegant solution using pyftsubset
You're picking on the 0.25% searches that still return something useful.
1f60c 9 hours ago [-]
I think you're moving the goalposts. I didn't know this problem existed until OP's article taught me about it, but it seems pointless to continue this discussion.
In Bing Maps, I expect them change country borders based on localization settings, but that was probably too onerous to implement and test in the Windows 95 days.
LeoPanthera 2 days ago [-]
I remember when this happened, which I guess makes me very old.
They didn't actually remove the map - they just removed any functionality it had. So the time set window is massive for no reason, it contains this huge world map bitmap that no longer does anything.
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
They eventually did remove part of the map: because of politics and timing, Poland was accidentally removed despite the map time zone picker no longer working, because the dedicated Polish timezone the green pixels were attached to were removed.
Kwpolska 2 days ago [-]
Almost nothing, it scrolls horizontally to show the selected time zone in the middle.
canucker2016 2 days ago [-]
Think of the dev/test/PM people who worked on this feature.
It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al.
The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
jey 2 days ago [-]
You're not too far from the truth -- most mapping services render political boundaries differently based on where you're accessing the site from.
int_19h 2 days ago [-]
Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.
andix 2 days ago [-]
Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian.
I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.
Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
Google did this way back, sometime in 2016 IIRC, before they were blocked in Russia. I'm not really sure why they still keep going with this esp. since they still show the entirety of Donbas as Ukrainian, and it has been occupied for just as long as Crimea has been.
Yandex censorship around this is really amusing. They did indeed drop all mentions of countries and borders everywhere, for one thing. But also in Alice (their LLM chatbot), it's to the point where if you ask it to prepare a road trip from Sochi to Bucharest and describe the route in detail including which countries it passes through, it refuses to answer.
notpushkin 17 hours ago [-]
> Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway?
As far as I know, no it’s not? (Haven’t been to Russia for about a year now, but I haven’t heard about any blocks from my friends.)
riffraff 2 days ago [-]
the "gulf of america" thing is Google pandering to Trump, they originally had a policy of only using the popular name in a given locale.
> if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.
riffraff 1 days ago [-]
that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.
owlninja 1 days ago [-]
I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?
andix 1 days ago [-]
And nobody outside of the US cares about what's inside those official databases. If Trump changes the name of China to "Smelly Food Country" it might be required to change this in US Google Maps But if this propagates to Google Maps in other countries people will just laugh at them and might stop using it.
owlninja 20 hours ago [-]
But they should see what their home country calls it? I am totally against this, but don't really think Google is bending the knee or hard-coding a name here.
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
I don't think Google is required to change anything, since it's not a government agency.
IshKebab 2 days ago [-]
Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?
LAC-Tech 2 days ago [-]
I want maps to show reality. Not who they *think* should be in control of Taiwan or Transnistria, but who actually is.
lmm 2 days ago [-]
What does "actually in control" mean? When the IRA set up a checkpoint in Rosslea, should that have moved the border on the map? When there are disputes over uninhabited islands, do you want it to show whoever visited first? Obviously these are small examples, but the same issues apply to full-scale civil wars.
You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
jim-jim-jim 2 days ago [-]
> You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest
Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.
makeitdouble 1 days ago [-]
> Documenting reality
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.
LAC-Tech 1 days ago [-]
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
No, in a disputed territory there's one reality, and 1..n delusions.
lmm 18 hours ago [-]
Well, maybe that's what the victor will write in the future history books, but since today's mapmakers don't know who's going to win that's not really a helpful perspective.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
For each "disputed" territory there is only one party actually in control right now. If you bothered to actually travel to e.g. Taiwan you'd quickly find out that the PRC's opinions are irrelevant.
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
The situation on the ground is that if you, say, visit Crimea by obtaining a Russian visa, you might not even be able to enter Ukraine afterwards. This feels like something that also needs to be reflected.
lmm 2 days ago [-]
It's the opposite of meaningless. Delegitimising wars of conquest massively reduced them and was a big part of why the 20th century was so much more peaceful on the whole (yes, even with the giant wars that did take place) than those before it.
IshKebab 1 days ago [-]
That's a very big and dubious claim! I'd like to see some evidence for that.
rpd9803 1 days ago [-]
Even Old New York used to be call New Amsterdam..
strictnein 2 days ago [-]
The Kashmir region north of New Delhi is an interesting example. Even in the US, Google basically says you're on your own, but here's a collection of dotted lines that may or may not be the actual borders.
SpicyLemonZest 2 days ago [-]
Basically any large platform that renders map data realizes pretty quickly that you have to adjust it country by country to accommodate everyone’s irredentist claims and naming disputes. I suppose there’s no reason they couldn’t ship different system fonts to different countries, but that introduces a lot of annoyance and room for error for a somewhat marginal use case.
andix 2 days ago [-]
It’s the reality of doing business all around the world.
Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
immibis 1 days ago [-]
BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.
SllX 1 days ago [-]
Two things:
1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use.
2) Maps apps are probably going to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago.
Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.
nottorp 14 hours ago [-]
So it's only bad when the Chinese or Russians do it? :)
account42 10 hours ago [-]
Surely you can see the difference between trying to deny a group of people their right of self-determination vs. posturing over a stretch of water.
nottorp 7 hours ago [-]
I see that posturing over a stretch of water can easily lead to denying a group of people the right of self-determination.
SllX 4 hours ago [-]
I mean if you’re conflating invading and annexing parts of or whole independent nations with the naming of bodies of water and other geographic features, I can’t help you with that one. You’ll need a professional. That’s not even half the gotcha you think it is.
I’m not even one to defend the PRC, but between the PRC, the Republic of China, Korea, Japan, and Russia there’s a lot of land and naming disputes between them.
1 days ago [-]
est 1 days ago [-]
In case you aren't aware, the "Gulf of Mexico" thing just happenned few days ago.
I believe google maps have already implemented the Gulf of America for US users.
skrebbel 2 days ago [-]
I'm the author of the country-flag-emoji-polyfill mentioned in the article. If the author reads this, maybe a correction is warranted: the polyfill doesn't actually depend on public CDNs. The library itself is a regular NPM package so you can install it locally and bundle it into your JS, and it takes a parameter "fontUrl" for when you prefer to self-host the font file. It only falls back to jsdelivr when no URL is specified.
Nice writeup btw. I still can't get over how ridiculous it is that Windows doesn't have country flags emojis. It just means that every app/website ends up applying a hacky patch like this.
pentacent_hq 2 days ago [-]
Very helpful post! I was using flag emojis on a landing page and completely unaware that they weren't being rendered correctly on Windows.
The author mentions a polyfill [1] and the fact that they dislike it's using a CDN. Fortunately, the polyfill can be configured to use a local/self-hosted font:
> although you’ll still be on the hook for downloading the entire 1.4MB font file
I haven't tested with emojis (never thought of it, great test case!) but try Fontimize, which creates font subsets based on text your site actually uses. It runs over the HTML and CSS and creates an applicable subset.
But the Python API supports passing just some specific text. Try using that, passing any and every flag you wish. You should be able to get a font file that contains just the country flags this way.
I really need to get back to this library and add predefined subsets like, say, extended Latin, or country flags!
My biggest problem with flag emojis is that flags change, so the meaning of text encoded with Unicode changes.
During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag.
These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus.
I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag.
_____________
¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time.
Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.
sandruso 2 days ago [-]
Yep, can confirm that emoji flags are evil. We had same problem. Windows users reported missing flags and few google searches away we found out that emoji flags are not supported.
ggm 2 days ago [-]
Found with related issues in work contexts that people can be very forgiving of baked-in things, and simply block on new entrants.
If you ship android as-is from a GIT repo that has <forbidden thing> you can be ok. If you write an app or show slideware which refers to <forbidden thing> you are in the naughty corner for a while.
It's because people who are responding are responding intelligently. They know what they can effect: the future. The past, is another country. They can't get the git repo to ban the <forbidden thing> but they can make your life hell for including it.
So to an outsider this looks "inconsistent" but its (in my opinion) entirely internally consistent: Only act on things you can influence.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
yes, we know, there are historical territorial disputes all over the world. But can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?
mjr00 2 days ago [-]
If the essence of your question is "are there US-aligned/non-China countries who would have issues about certain flags", the answer is yes. Good example: the flag for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea. The Western world acknowledges North Korea as a separate entity. South Korea does not and considers the North part of its territory. They wouldn't be too happy about a NK flag on their operating system giving legitimacy to the state.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
no, (a) that's not the essence of my question and (b) I was not asking the essence of my question, I was asking literally my question.
Microsoft would not respond to North Korea by deleting all the unicode flags all over the world, so while that might get you closer to the essence of your question, there's no point in me asking my question if you are just going to dodge it.
mjr00 2 days ago [-]
Your question was
> can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?
I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is.
Or more simply: no, this is not just because of China and Taiwan.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
saying "it's North Korea" does not make a case that it's North Korea (especially when I acknowledged these disputes are all around the world, indicating that I understood that already). Fail.
zinekeller 2 days ago [-]
There are ROK (South Korea) laws banning the display of DPRK (North Korea) imagery (and more), including the DPRK flag. Microsoft considers the SK market important enough that it has a separate version of Windows (the KN subvariant), so it's not really far-fetched that this is a consideration too.
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
The ban on "display" of the DPRK flag means flying the flag in public or on a building, it doesn't mean viewing the file on a computer.
lmm 2 days ago [-]
Practically every place in the world where it's disputed whether it's part of another country or independent creates a flag issue. Do you include a Quebec flag? Northern Ireland? Somaliland? Palestine?
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
Given the context though we don't need to look at all possible hypothetical flags, only those that Unicode recognizes:
This list notably doesn't have Quebec, Northern Ireland, or Somaliland. But it does have Taiwan and Palestinian Territories.
lmm 14 hours ago [-]
Huh. Including England/Scotland/Wales but not Northern Ireland feels extremely arbitrary, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if it ran afoul of some kind of discrimination law in the UK.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
what I asked was to convince me that this is not about China.
you have failed to convince me that this is about quebec, somalililand or palestine, those are absurd notions, so you have failed to convince me that this is not about china.
lmm 2 days ago [-]
I find it entirely plausible that it's about Palestine (in the sense that that would be sufficient cause for MS to want to avoid shipping a list of countries even if there wasn't a China/Taiwan issue) given that e.g. several US states have laws that make companies ineligible for public contracts if they participate in boycotting Israel. To say nothing of wanting to make sales in Israel itself.
(Of course it won't really be about any one thing, it will be about all of these things - and China is probably the biggest and most relevant case. But it's by no means the only one)
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
using "reddit terminology" (not that there's anything good about reddit anymore but they do have the terminology), this post is about microsoft and the flag emojis, and up and down the thread are a zillion comments all about "it's generic territorial disputes".
I try to start a subthread about perhaps an alternative idea, and I get responses that are all about the same blather that's already everywhere else. People here have no intellectual subtlety: I wouldn't bother commenting to elicit responses that are all the same thing that's already here. Try to say something different. Make a case.
(and if you know anything about the history of Microsoft and Israel, no, it's not about Palestine. Ask any Israeli on here, did Microsoft drop flag emojis because of Israeli sensitivities?)
lmm 2 days ago [-]
> I try to start a subthread about perhaps an alternative idea, and I get responses that are all about the same blather that's already everywhere else. People here have no intellectual subtlety: I wouldn't bother commenting to elicit responses that are all the same thing that's already here. Try to say something different. Make a case.
The "reddit terminology" for this is /r/iamverysmart . If everyone else understands your comment a different way from the way you intended it, maybe it's not that they're all stupid, maybe you didn't express yourself very well.
fsckboy 1 days ago [-]
fact: 99% of people are dumber than the top 1%: so, "If everyone else understands your comment a different way" it precisely matches the case that they're all stupid-er than the 1%.
And that's how you construct an argument.
LAC-Tech 2 days ago [-]
Chinese denialism over Taiwan is really, really demented. It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground.
I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.
dixie_land 2 days ago [-]
Funny you mentioned Mongolia. Republic of China (Taiwan) still recognize it as part of its territory (together with mainland China).
It is the communist that ceded a lot of territory to the Soviet Union and the puppet state of Mongolia to appease the USSR by having a buffer between it and china
LAC-Tech 2 days ago [-]
But that's mainly due to how the PRC operates, right?
Like when the PRC threatened invasion when the UK wanted Hong Kong to elect its own leaders, then later they can turn around and say "the British never even let the Hong Kong people vote".
Some with Taiwan / R.O.C and it's territorial claims.
fsckboy 2 days ago [-]
ok, but that didn't answer my question.
hackerdues 1 days ago [-]
> Chinese denialism over Taiwan is really, really demented.
Denialism is demented. But it's not chinese denialism that's the problem. It's the denialism by the side that lost the civil war.
> It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground.
They won the civil war. It's their territory.
> I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.
The mongols are the ones that conquered china. Think you got your histories mixed up.
What's with your obsession with taiwan?
int_19h 1 days ago [-]
They are not physically in control of Taiwan, so no, they haven't "won the war" in that respect.
Not that it matters, because legitimacy of holding territory is not based on winning wars.
hackerdues 21 hours ago [-]
> They are not physically in control of Taiwan, so no, they haven't "won the war" in that respect.
They won the civil war, just like the vietnamese won their war of independence against france. It's just that china, like vietnam, needs to win another war. The war against the US to fully liberate their nation like vietnam did.
> Not that it matters, because legitimacy of holding territory is not based on winning wars.
Sure it is. It's the wars we won against britain, spain, mexico, japan, etc that gained all our territory. You think spain gave up florida, mexico gave up texas and japan gave up the pacific islands because they were feeling generous? Winning wars is what ultimately decides who owns what. The past 500 years has been europeans winning wars and stealing land all over the world. Actually, all of human history is people taking territory by force. Actually, this also applies to lions, wolves and ants.
The reason china doesn't control taiwan is because they chickened out and decided not to fight the US for taiwan. The chinese should look to india for some inspiration. Know why goa is part of india again? India forcibly took it back.
So in summary, China lost the war for Taiwan. The fact that they may or may not start another one over the territory which they may or may not win is irrelevent - they do NOT control Formosa or any of the smaller islands around it at this point. So yes, pretending that Taiwan does not exist when anyone who would travel there can clearly see otherwise is denialism.
butz 1 days ago [-]
Flag emojis were not working on Edge for who knows how long, and nobody cared.
moebrowne 1 days ago [-]
What are the chances this is already being used to help fingerprint users...
xdennis 2 days ago [-]
Personally I prefer rendering country codes over flags because it allows me to spot and scold anyone who uses the flag of Chad to represent Romania (they look pretty much the same as emojis).
extraduder_ire 1 days ago [-]
Ivory Coast flag being used for Ireland is another common one, though easier to spot. I assume because it's listed first alphabetically.
Doesn't help that most emoji fonts render all flags in the same aspect ratio.
65 2 days ago [-]
Can't forget Indonesia and Monaco!
2 days ago [-]
B-Con 2 days ago [-]
Presumably this is a big company problem of playing politics safely: They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag and furthermore don't want to acknowledge which country politics are even disputed and so don't support the rest.
paulgb 2 days ago [-]
Microsoft has at least one maps product (Bing Maps), and at one time had an encyclopedia with an atlas. You’d think they’d have a way of dealing with disputed territory.
CamouflagedKiwi 2 days ago [-]
I'm sure they do have a way of dealing with it in Bing Maps - I assume they can display borders differently depending on the country of origin (I think that's the common approach), but that has zero technological overlap with the presence or absence of Unicode flag codepoints in a system-level font.
makeitdouble 1 days ago [-]
Getting out of these issues as fast as they can could be the learning they got from these products.
aleph_minus_one 2 days ago [-]
> They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag
Why not simply collect all the prevalent "stances" on the disputed topics, and give the user to choose on each stance individually (or for a better user experience: create some presets of "stances that often occur together", which the user can use to activate multiple stances at once).
Alex-Programs 2 days ago [-]
That'd be amusing. When you first install Windows, you get...
"Is the island to the east of mainland China (also known as Taiwan, or Chinese Taipei) part of the People's Republic of China?"
"What is the legal status of Gibraltar?"
"Who ought to have won the Cod Wars?"
And on, and on...
Alternatively, have your pick of
"Western (standard)"
"Western (tankie)"
"Chinese (the big one)"
"Chinese (the small, disputed one)"
"American (pro-Iceland)"
"American (pro-UK, for the purpose of the Cod Wars)"
"British (Still Irritated Over Suez)"
"British ('What's Suez?')"
Your idea is quite sensible, of course, but you could make it quite absurd if you liked. Perhaps I'll put something like this together one evening. I'm sure there are more silly disagreements to include than the ones I know of as a brit.
mschuster91 2 days ago [-]
Some of the target countries have laws on the books with teeth regarding their individual disputes.
throw16180339 1 days ago [-]
India is one of them.
justinclift 2 days ago [-]
Heh, hopefully browsers wouldn't be able to query the user answers to that info as it would be extremely fingerprint/identifying.
Dylan16807 2 days ago [-]
I don't think there are any meaningful disputes over multiple flags on a specific code? Having some extra non-conflicting flags doesn't disrupt anything, it just leads to some people being petty.
wkat4242 2 days ago [-]
> After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font.
Sigh.. I'm so sick of companies pandering to bad regimes. This, google displaying the south china sea as part of china locally, meta dropping their DEI program after trump took over. None of the companies I know showing pride flags in Arab countries on their website during pride month (while of course widely proclaiming their support in PR and internal material everywhere else). It's all so fake. Stick by your values, then we stick by you as a customer.
AraceliHarker 2 days ago [-]
Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used, such as Simplified Chinese and Hebrew versions. However, Microsoft is not a company that respects the culture and language of each country. It has a bad habit of forcing what it decides in Redmond all over the world.
kccqzy 1 days ago [-]
Both North Korea and South Korea use the Korean language. So when the language is set to the Korean language do you hide the North Korean flag or the South Korean flag?
justinclift 2 days ago [-]
> Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used ...
That seems like it wouldn't work the way you're meaning in some pretty common cases. For example, with the Russian language.
danjl 2 days ago [-]
Does this problem disappear if you specify your own font for your site, like Roboto?
TonyTrapp 2 days ago [-]
If the font contains the missing emojis, sure. Emoji fonts tend to be huge though. The base Roboto font doesn't contain the emojis IIRC, there's a separate Roboto Emoji font for this reason (it's several dozen MBs).
qingcharles 2 days ago [-]
You can also do like a lot of major sites and just identify the codepoints and replace them with images as a kludge. I think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".
gruez 2 days ago [-]
>think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".
Funny you say that, considering it originally was an actual gun, then companies progressively changed it to a water gun until it was the defacto standard. I guess if something got changed for "woke" reasons, and it sticks around long enough, you can dunk on the guy changing it back for being "anti-woke"?
bobsmooth 2 days ago [-]
When politics meets programming.
indulona 2 days ago [-]
yeah, i had to add svg icons to my frontend which takes a ton of space in the compiled project...for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
yieldcrv 2 days ago [-]
> Can you imagine if, gasp, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror!
Just playing devil’s advocate but I kind of get it
If there was a separatist region you felt wasn’t legitimate or entirely delusional in both their existence and their aims, and third parties started giving them legitimacy with flags that your former neighbor made up at night, you would be like “cmon, wtf, cut that out”
obviously I can’t relate to this in any way, but I could imagine it could occur the longer I live
makeitdouble 1 days ago [-]
To note, the original emoji set was half funky and didn't pretend to represent anything political. That's where French oversea depts flags ( Martinique, St Pierre et Miquelon etc.) or UK flags (england, wales etc) are included even as those are not countries.
I think we're taking emoji way too seriously in average. Perhaps we should start including popular flag propositions that got shut down by the officials (like the Australian flag redesign contest) just to make it clear that emoji are just words and nothing more.
immibis 1 days ago [-]
they still have a flag though. Tying the flag to the country code is controversial because you believe only countries should get country codes, but if they weren't limited to two characters, flag code TAIWAN is hopefully about as controversial as flag code RAINBOW or LASERKIWI or HARVARDSPORTSBALLTEAM.
They're all kind of silly though. If you want an image use <img>...
bawolff 2 days ago [-]
Flag emoijis are a political nightmare.
Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region?
Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it).
Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the ukrainian flag in their old writings replaced with russian ones after a software update. Feels like something out of 1984.
I don't think the UN really defines borders, its more what other countries recognize and various international law rules. At most the un security counil can declare a defacto change in border should not be recognized (usually to ensure that an act of agression isnt rewarded with territory) but its actually super rare for them to do that and they have only done it a few times
tobr 2 days ago [-]
Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.
Y_Y 2 days ago [-]
But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I already allocated it.
This is going pretty well, but seems tedious, so for all other cases let's just merge ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 639-1 as follows:
SELECT
c.code AS common_code,
c.country_name,
l.language_name
FROM iso_3166 c
INNER JOIN iso_639 l
ON c.code = l.code;
And if they don't speak Afrikaans in Afghanistan or Arabic in Argentina then you'll have to take it up with the International Organization for Standardization.
toolslive 2 days ago [-]
So
- for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag.
- for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia.
- for German, I'll use the flag of Austria.
- for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag.
- for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname.
just see how happy people are with this ;)
ahoka 2 days ago [-]
No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.
toolslive 2 days ago [-]
Canada?
riffraff 2 days ago [-]
TIL Canada is actually larger than India and it's not just a projection artifact!
marcosdumay 2 days ago [-]
In area, yes. But then the China flag would represent a dozen languages.
In population, no, the GP is correct.
culi 2 days ago [-]
That's not the only issue. India has over 1,600 native languages and 22 "official" ones. Which language would a country like that represent?
What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?
SllX 2 days ago [-]
Depends.
The Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation both have flags to use that could theoretically be incorporated into Unicode if they didn't draw the line at National flags, but you could always draw flag representations in SVG instead.
But I also think this discussion has gone so far into the theoretical it's kind of ignored a very practical point: how many languages do you need to present in your software, because your software is actually localized in that language? Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country (and even some of those are relatively obscure), and countries that have >1 languages usually share an official language with another country that uses it more predominantly. At this point in time, the economies of scale do not favor actually localizing software in 1600 different languages, so we don't. At all.
In fact, the usual pattern for developers from Europe and the Americas is to favor their dominant language and localizing in other dominant languages that originated in Europe and some of their more popular variants, and then maybe also some combination of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu, and Korean.
So when you're presented with a number of languages and variants exceeding 30 in a list, flags probably aren't going to cut it anymore, but there's still some design space to use flags as language representations if you want.
culi 2 days ago [-]
> Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country
There are over 30 languages in India with at least a million NATIVE speakers. 7 of those are in the top 30 most spoken languages in the world
SllX 2 days ago [-]
I am already aware of that, but stating that here does not contradict what I said, neither that line specifically nor that line within the full context of my comment. Indian software written by Indians for the Indian market might be different though, but I'll defer to any Indians that want to chime in on that subject themselves.
Dylan16807 2 days ago [-]
Okay. But do you think the line you quoted is incorrect?
marc_abonce 2 days ago [-]
Sorry for the shameless plug, but I already made a reusable React component for that in case anybody needs it for their business:
That "Features included" selection is golden, the "Every file is called index to turn your code editor into a fun maze for the entire family to enjoy." item actually made me laugh out loud.
Y_Y 2 days ago [-]
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Maybe because people don't realize you're in on the joke and that this is a parody package.
Tijdreiziger 2 days ago [-]
As a Surinamese Dutch person, I fail to see any issues with this approach. ;)
Y_Y 2 days ago [-]
Joking aside, I have heard of people deliberately doing a sort of inverse version of this. For example, if you live in Barcelona then Ubuntu's installer will detect you as being in Madrid's timezones and wanted to use Spain Spanish locale. If you insist that you're in Andorra you get an equivalent timezone and the Catalan locale (which is the preference for a lot of people, despite the bizarre way of reporting time).
toolslive 1 days ago [-]
I do this all the time:
- I want proper English,
- and Proper SI units,
- and Euro as currency.
So I put myself in Dublin.
extraduder_ire 1 days ago [-]
I've heard this also enables some of the EU-mandated features in newer windows versions. Like being able to uninstall edge.
harrall 2 days ago [-]
We had a good budget for localization at my previous place and had like 10 Englishes and some countries had both their local language and English as options.
Tijdreiziger 2 days ago [-]
Oh man, international corporations forcing me into the translation of their website is a huge pet peeve of mine, as the translation is usually poor.
Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.
terinjokes 2 days ago [-]
Still annoyed I have to patch in en_NL on all my systems because glibc developers don't think it's legitimate.
the_other 2 days ago [-]
Nice. Even Japan (jp) and Japanese (ja) lose out with this.
immibis 2 days ago [-]
"I represented some things with wrong symbols and it didn't work well, therefore the idea of using symbols to represent these things is wrong"
troad 2 days ago [-]
I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages.
No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages.
No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names.
No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages.
For the most common languages, flags are fine.
Edit: I'm amused by the amount of replies that assume the only context that ever requires symbolic language representation is websites. Awesome, how do I add one of your JavaScript language drop-downs to a physical product label? Or an airline steward's name tag?
bawolff 2 days ago [-]
> No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages.
As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid.
Not to mention for all those languages that are not the majority language in any country.
troad 2 days ago [-]
> As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery.
As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.
> Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words.
The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?
bawolff 2 days ago [-]
> As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.
As an australian, when was the last time the Australian flag was the incorrect choice for you? I'm going to guess never.
boredatoms 2 days ago [-]
When is there ever an Australian flag to choose
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
You’re saying this on HN, where plenty of people work on software affecting tens of millions of people. You wanna leave your phone number and explain your “well I ain’t offended” strategy to the next PM who’ll ask you about their users in Taiwan? The Russian speakers in Ukraine who saw their homes demolished by those who brandish the flag you’re not offended by? Maybe I should just invite you to my country of Belgium (four languages, not one of them being “the Belgian one”) for you to see what people here routinely think of those who can’t imagine the simple differences :)
troad 2 days ago [-]
I had initially posted a joke reply to this, but I'll post a serious one: I care a lot more about getting necessary services to elderly, semi-literate Russian-speaking babushkas fleeing Ukraine, by giving them an obvious indicator (on e.g. a name tag) that someone can speak to them, help them, then I care about your completely absurd, concocted 'well akshuallys'.
bawolff 2 days ago [-]
Guess the Crimean Tatar speakers just get screwed?
troad 2 days ago [-]
Yes, sadly, by Stalin and Putin, not by the choice of language symbols.
Crimean Tartars, by the way, are a great example of a people that have their own flag, despite that flag not being the official flag of any independent nation-state. If someone is a speaker of Crimean Tartar, and working with Ukrainian refugees, they should add that flag to their name tag too.
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
I work in Brussels with a lot of Ukrainians — both fighters and refugees. I’ve made this a part of my day to day life since the full scale invasion. We until recently even shared an office with the Ukrainian Voices refugee committee, in fact.
Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much you’d like to contribute.
Dylan16807 2 days ago [-]
That's a useless way to rebut their specific argument. Not a single reason in your post.
You could talk about your experience, but you're not doing that.
And the claims they made about how much they care were not extreme. "Putting their money where their keyboard is" could be accomplished with $10. Would $10 make you happy or settle anything at all?
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
My experience? My experience is you have a lot of people who claim to care about Ukraine, but then go on to say things such as “they should just give up the land”.
The above conversation is a good example of this. Ukrainian people are very patriotic especially now, and flags are a highly symbolic and meaningful subject. And not wanting to listen to “just don’t use a flag for languages”, which is a ridiculously simple ask, to then pretend it’s not a big deal for those who lost their homes and families?
GP has no idea what it’s like to be be in the exact case they claim to care about. So yes, I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate those who don’t listen to the simplest asks.
Dylan16807 1 days ago [-]
> My experience?
Your experience with flag use.
Your experience with people claiming to care about Ukraine isn't relevant because the above user only claimed that they care about it significantly more than a thing they don't care about. That's a super weak claim.
You're twisting it into a major claim so you can put them down for failing to live up to your standards of caring, when it was only a relative comparison.
> GP has no idea what it’s like
Which you are not trying to remedy. You are only trying to prove they don't care enough, as if that's going to somehow prove their original claim about flag use incorrect.
> I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate
Instead of? Does that mean no explanation even if you get them to donate?
> those who don’t listen to the simplest ask
Simple doesn't mean correct. Both sides of this argument are simple.
2 days ago [-]
2 days ago [-]
esperent 2 days ago [-]
Just wait because all official EU sites now use the Irish flag to represent English, and it's getting more common in other websites made in Europe.
As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.
But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.
I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...
But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.
extraduder_ire 1 days ago [-]
The Ivory Coast flag is a different aspect ratio to Ireland's flag. Ours is longer.
The colour-based representation on their flag is similar to ours too, but with the colours reversed.
esperent 22 hours ago [-]
> The Ivory Coast flag is a different aspect ratio to Ireland's flag. Ours is longer.
I did not know that. Always assumed there was a standard aspect ratio for flags.
philwelch 2 days ago [-]
Shouldn’t the Irish flag represent Irish Gaelic though?
esperent 2 days ago [-]
English is an official language of Ireland, and by far the most wildly spoken. Gaeilge is also an official language but <4% of Irish people use it as their main language.
However, this is another reason why flags aren't a good choice for languages. It works for some of the main languages - German, French, etc. where there's a clear one to one link between originating country's flag and language.
It's less clear for English - the UK flag, the US flag, the Irish flag and apparently even the Canadian flag gets used.
It's basically impossible to choose a flag for minority languages, and many countries have multiple official and widely spoken unofficial languages. What flag should represent Balinese, for example?
I don't have a better solution, and if your site is translated to just a couple of languages it's fine. But I guess as machine translation gets closer to perfect and very cheap, it'll become more common to have lots of translations.
philwelch 1 days ago [-]
If somebody said to me, “I speak American”, I would infer that they meant the American dialect of the English language. If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic. Similarly, if I saw a Welsh flag on a language selection UI, I would assume that it represented the Welsh Brythonic language even though most Welsh people speak English.
Unicode makes this hard (though it does provide the Welsh flag) but in principle you could solve this for some minority languages. For instance if you wanted to support Catalan, just use the flag of Catalonia, since they have one. You don’t need to have a country to have a flag, and you don’t need to have a country for your flag to become part of Unicode. Unicode has the transgender flag for instance. For Balinese maybe I would just use the flag of Bali.
esperent 22 hours ago [-]
> If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic
But if someone said "I'm from Ireland", you should assume they speak English as their main language. Even if they say "I speak Irish", there's a high chance they're not fully fluent, it's an identity thing for many Irish people.
In any case, it's probably best not to read too much in to this. The whole point is that using flags to represent languages risks getting caught up in exactly this kind of minutiae.
The text EN is unique for English and removes all for it. Put a flag next to the text if you like.
dkdbejwi383 1 days ago [-]
> Is it the british flag?
obviously the British flag is for the least controversial option, Ulster Scots.
culi 2 days ago [-]
Places like Wikipedia have a list of languages spelled out in the orthography most used for the written version of that language.
I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language
do_not_redeem 2 days ago [-]
That's great unless you're scrolling through 200 languages trying to find yours and can't figure out how they're sorted. Remind me again, does မြန်မာစကား come before or after चम्बयाळी ?
marc_abonce 2 days ago [-]
I like how Wikipedia mitigates that problem by placing "Suggested languages" at the top (I think the top choices are inferred from either the Accept-Language HTTP header or the most common languages from the user's country) and below that there's a list of "Worldwide" languages which include the most used languages in the world, and finally the rest of the languages are grouped by continent.
There's also a search bar for filtering and it works with either the native or foreign name of the language. So, for example, typing "Finnish", "Suomi" or "Fines" (the latter is even misspelled, should be "Finés") will all filter out the right language.
Of course, there may be an edge case that's missing, but it's as close as perfect as it can get without reading the user's mind.
culi 2 days ago [-]
Ctrl + F
And it doesn't have to have every single language. There's over 7,000 languages in the world. It just needs to have languages for which content exists. For the vast vast majority of Wikipedia articles there are less than 10 languages available
ttepasse 2 days ago [-]
You can build bigger menus that a popup and sort them into usable buckets.
Take a look at tesla.com. The shitty CEO aside, the language/locale menu does it right: An understandable globe icon opens a menu, that menu is sorted by continents, countries and for those countries languages - with their name written in their local script.
kevin_thibedeau 2 days ago [-]
The sites showing flags for translations usually have no more than a half dozen.
mikedelfino 2 days ago [-]
Google Translator lists languages' names, and the list is pretty reasonable. I'm confident that designers could make it work even on interfaces where the language is a more subtle option.
xdennis 2 days ago [-]
> No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names.
Yes, every language has a name and you can use that. If you prefer an imprecise flag over the actual name of the language then what you're saying is that you prefer style over substance. There's always space to show the language name.
closewith 2 days ago [-]
Are you seriously arguing against the use of ideograms? User interfaces without them would be unusable.
zdragnar 2 days ago [-]
Many languages don't correspond to flag ideograms, and many flags don't correspond to a single language.
Ideograms are fine so long as they can be replaced with a canonical word or phrase and still make sense.
Flags for languages fails that in many cases around the world- if I want to select Quebecoise French, neither the Canadian, French, or Quebec Province flags are appropriate.
Likewise, Switzerland has no official language, and many countries such as Belgium have multiple.
layer8 2 days ago [-]
Not the GP, but ideograms/pictograms are overused, half of the time one has no idea what they are supposed to mean. That was already bad in desktop interfaces where you would at least get a tooltip when hovering the mouse over it, but that has gone out of fashion as well.
zmgsabst 2 days ago [-]
There’s really not.
I frequently travel in places where I don’t speak the primary language — and having to hunt down a menu in a language I can’t read sounds a lot worse than having a flag I know visible on the main page.
troad 2 days ago [-]
Why did you use letters to send your reply? Letters are a symbolic representation of language, but they are imprecise. I don't know the prosody of your utterance, what tone you used, what accent you're speaking, etc. This is unacceptable and I am very offended. /s
Symbols are useful. You can quibble over the symbols chosen (they don't seem to do a lot of physical weighing in courts?), but that is fundamentally besides the point, which is 'how do I convey this widely understood concept in a limited amount of space?'.
braiamp 2 days ago [-]
The browser or the host system usually informs you about the language. Apple and Google solved the rest by using geofence data. If you have a menu/screen to select the language, you can write as much as you want and have overflow for the long list. Order them by current language based on collation, and done. People want "language" to be too accessible when it doesn't need to be. Also, see amazon.
Alex-Programs 2 days ago [-]
I develop a language learning tool that uses flags for languages extensively.
I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one.
For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficult and rely on convention (e.g. the Egyptian flag for Arabic).
The landing page (https://nuenki.app) has a cloud of flags of the supported languages. It's an information dense, easy to scan way of seeing whether your language is supported. Sure, it's not technically 100% accurate, but what's the alternative?
bdhcuidbebe 2 days ago [-]
Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly.
Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation.
Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch).
Even your example of Sweden is naive, as we have Swedish, Finnish, Sapmi, Meänkieli and I would argue Älvdalska is another proper language too, even if it dont have official status.
Its a very flawed idea and no matter how pretty it may look, it cant map to reality and is just misleading at best.
Alex-Programs 2 days ago [-]
India is definitely a difficult one. I'm using it to represent Hindi, and that's the one that makes me the most uncomfortable, because there are so many languages. I think the intent is reasonably clear, but if all countries were that ambigious, I'd avoid flags.
Nuenki supports European Spanish (though now you mention it, I ought to make that clearer). If it were American Spanish, I'd probably use Mexico. I handle Portuguese that way.
Switzerland is easy, because I have no need to include their flag. German is covered by Germany (yes, I know of Austria), French by France, etc.
And I'm highly unlikely to add Romansh, if only because it'd be very difficult to translate with good quality. I would if I could though, I find it fascinating. For a flag, I'd find an online Romansh community and ask what flag people would find most respectful + representative, or if people would prefer I forgo it.
You argue that it's misleading. I see where you're coming from. It isn't perfectly explicit and unambiguous. However, I don't think it's misleading in practice.
Nobody looks at a Spanish flag and thinks it's denoting Catalan - I'd probably use a regional flag there - nor do people look at a Union Jack or an American flag and go "no idea what that's for". When looking to see if Nuenki supports Finnish, nobody looks for the Swedish flag. They look for the Finnish flag.
People know what the stereotypical flags are, particularly when they're learning that language.
So imo it's about absolute precision vs UX, and the UX of reading through a textual list of languages is awful. It's a complete pain to scan through without any kind of visual indicator. That's why, in practice, everyone uses flags.
I didn't previously use flags so widely. Adding them everywhere (e.g. the dropdowns on the demo) was a result of feedback from people who felt it would make it nicer to use. Also, they're generally alongside the full name (aside from the aforementioned cloud), to clear up any ambiguity.
crazygringo 2 days ago [-]
> Flags for languages dont even work with one of the largest countries, India. They have about 20 official languages that var greatly.
Curious, do Indian websites just never use flags then?
Or do they use flags for the states within India?
Because at a quick glance, it seems like there is a general mapping of languages to one or more states:
This doesn’t really work, though, because while languages are vaguely correlated to regions of the country they don’t match up with entities that have flags. It’s like if the US south had a language common there: what icon would you use? Alabama? It’s also worth noting that just because a language is used in a particular region doesn’t mean it is actually dominant. Coming back to the US, it would be kind of like marking the American southwest as “Spanish” because a lot of people speak it there, and many at home, but even while most conversations in public happen in English.
sterlind 1 days ago [-]
> It’s like if the US south had a language common there: what icon would you use?
Having grown up in the South, the Stars and Bars would be a depressingly popular choice.
2 days ago [-]
ludwik 2 days ago [-]
I don't think anybody claims that it is not a flawed idea. From what I understand from this thread, people who use flags to represent languages fully acknowledge that it is a flawed idea - the problem is that they lack an alternative solution in some contexts (for example, those that require high information density).
jamager 1 days ago [-]
However, the mapping normally is from language to flag, not the other way around.
German -> Germany, French -> France, Swedish -> Sweden.
It's not perfect, but 99% of times it communicates what is meant to communicate, which is more than what you can say of many icons.
cco 2 days ago [-]
In your experience, what's the better option for an iconographic representation?
bdhcuidbebe 2 days ago [-]
Not using icon, but using names
rrr_oh_man 2 days ago [-]
Give me one example of a website that supports, let's say, three of the 20+ Indian languages, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Swiss French, Swiss German, Swiss Italian, and Romansh.
You will have a hard time, even on Wikipedia.
For most people, flags absolutely are the best shorthand for the language of the same name.
Not to mention the software is translated into more (you can go to preferences to see the full list), wikipedia just makes the practical decision that there is no point having british, american and canadian english as separate projects, but you can chose any of them for the software interface (interestingly there are separate wikipedia projects for https://sco.wikipedia.orghttps://jam.wikipedia.org and https://ang.wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia has more languages then there are countries.
bdhcuidbebe 2 days ago [-]
wikipedia, google translate
zmgsabst 2 days ago [-]
Google Translate only supports French and French (Canada), not French (Swiss) — at least that I can see.
bdhcuidbebe 1 days ago [-]
Swiss french is not as much of a distinct variation, rather a dialect very similar to Belgian french.
rrr_oh_man 12 hours ago [-]
Try arguing this with a Swiss linguist. :)
tyre 2 days ago [-]
If someone see's the spanish flag on a language learning site, they're going to know it's spanish. No one looks at that and think, "hmm, no, I don't want to learn basque."
It may be technically correct, but it's pretty obvious to people what it means. It's extremely common.
bdhcuidbebe 2 days ago [-]
Its only being reinforced due to this kind of dumb presentation.
immibis 2 days ago [-]
that is literally how icons work yes
mikedelfino 2 days ago [-]
I checked the website and, at least at the combo box on the landing page, it already has the language name! I guess that you could just go without the flag there, and it'd still work. I'm curious though, what flag would you use for English? Would it depend on whether you spell gray or grey? Duolingo uses the United States of America flag, so there's that.
lmm 2 days ago [-]
As someone who uses websites, if you're not going to respect the browser's language setting (and most websites don't, for good reason) then please use a flag so that it's easy to find where I can switch away from your incorrectly-geodetected language setting. Flags do in fact represent languages, in that they are understood to denote languages, even if some people think they shouldn't.
crazygringo 2 days ago [-]
But as long as languages don't have any symbol, and symbols help with recognition, is it maybe just a lesser of evils?
It's clear that English originates from the UK and Portuguese originates from Portugal. Not to mention that sites often do have country variants -- the Brazilian Portuguese gets the Brazilian flag. And if a site is only for US and Mexican customers, a US flag makes sense rather than UK because it'll also use US currency.
And a flag icon also helps your eye quickly find the localization drop-down mixed in with a bunch of other stuff in the footer.
hiccuphippo 2 days ago [-]
Should there be emojis to represent languages? Maybe it could be a new group. I'd rather not use the flag shape, maybe a circle with the 2 letter code and a background with the colors from the flag usually used to represent that language, mainly because people is already used to scan the lists looking for those colors.
kelseyfrog 2 days ago [-]
It would be great if there were. I decided to see if such a thing existed and came across the Flag icons for languages page[1]. There is an absolutely hideous French, Belgium, Canadian mix flag so the bar for language emojis is very very low. In other words, it should be easy to do better.
no, cause nobody would understand them. Words exist, and websites that needs to show a lot of languages (google translate, deepl, wikipedia etc) just show you a list of names. It's really the easiest solution, cause people are _also_ really used to scanning text for their own language.
Alex-Programs 2 days ago [-]
I really wish there were. It'd make things a lot easier for me!
There aren't really existing unambiguous language icons, at least for the majority of languages, so it'd be less about making them a formal emoji and more about actually inventing + "legitimising" new icons so they can be broadly and uncontroversially used.
I doubt that'd happen in practice - there just isn't a pressing need, and you'd need an enormous (and likely controversial) public education campaign to make them adoptable - but it would be a neat design problem. r/vexillogy would have a field day.
stevage 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, but there is definitely no better option.
If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English.
(Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)
Doesn't really make a great case. I obviously recognise both the union jack and American flag as "English", and nobody would expect it to mean Welsh. Also there are approximately no people that speak Welsh and not English.
It's one of those "yes technically you're right, but actually it still works really well in practice so sod off" things. It's like saying tomatoes should be in the fruit aisle. No thanks. Sometimes utility is more important than anal correctness.
4 hours ago [-]
anal_reactor 2 days ago [-]
> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages
I feel obliged to point out that majority of engineers get stuck in 3-hour-long meeting discussing corner cases "is Okinawan a separate language" or "what even is a language", while refusing to address the business problem at hand, which is "I want my European user to pick between Italian, French and Spanish". I used to enjoy these "yes but technically no" discussions, but then I understood they never lead anywhere, because they're about solving the problem in some imaginary world that only exists in some people's heads, rather than the real one.
The truth is that there exist situations where using country flags is effective means of communicating the idea of a language. You might not like it, but that's how it works.
rrr_oh_man 2 days ago [-]
> I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages
Says who?
Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.
slater 2 days ago [-]
Say people from countries with multiple languages.
E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English.
Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
Alex-Programs 2 days ago [-]
There are very few countries with multiple equally-influential languages that don't have better alternatives for flags.
It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.
Countries may have ambiguous languages, but _languages very rarely have ambiguous countries_. Sure, there are Finnish speakers in Sweden, but the Swedish flag remains a clear indicator of the Swedish language.
Hindi and India is the main exception to this. Arabic is also difficult, though Egypt seems to have a slight edge by convention.
> UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades
I sympathise, and if they have any better ideas than a textual list that users need to read through rather than quickly scan (not very good UX...), I'd love to hear them. From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?
Kwpolska 2 days ago [-]
> It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.
Given that it's the fourth-most-common language in Switzerland, the Swiss flag might not be a good choice.
andreareina 2 days ago [-]
What flag would you use for Malay on a Singaporean site[1]?
> From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?
That flag cloud is actually hard for me to parse because where am I supposed to look for italian? I did find it, but I literally had to do a sequential scan because there's no apparent order to them. I would use a combo box searchable by: ISO language code, language name in english, language name in native language and script. It's clear what it's asking for, pretty much everyone is going to know at least one of the things it's asking for, it's not completely ascii centric. Flags can be added for some visual flair, and if you actually distinguish between (i.e. have different versions for) en-US and en-GB and en-SG, more power to you.
Tangential nit: nuenki.app shows the SPQR flag for (presumably) latin, but in the Language dropdown it's Latin (Classical) :classical_building::eagle:. Argh.
> E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English.
Switzerland seems pretty easy -- French, German and Italian get the obvious flags, while Romansh gets either the Swiss flag or the Grisons flag. No?
> Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
So it kind of seems to me like they've lost. They might be banging the drum, but in the real world the flags are useful.
rrr_oh_man 2 days ago [-]
That's fine for Switzerland. And I get the India case.
But why does it have to concern some Finnish online store that also has English and Swedish as options? Do their actual users really care? Because that is the litmus test, not the opinion of someone writing a blog.
torstenvl 2 days ago [-]
Are you claiming French- or German-speaking Swiss users don't know that they speak French or German?
Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?
slater 2 days ago [-]
Come on. I'm saying people in general don't want to be associated with a flag that's not of their country.
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
I've played video games that required me to select the Union Jack to select english language.
Despite two wars in our history, it does not bother me.
Because it's a language selection screen for fucks sake, I'm not marrying anything, or committing to a lifelong alliance.
If selecting the "wrong" flag makes you feel anything other than the mildest annoyance, seek professional mental help.
adzm 2 days ago [-]
On the other hand, this is very helpful when things are already in a language you don't understand.
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
One of my favourite newly discovered YouTubers, K Klein, talks a lot about language.
What sold me to subscribe to his channel is this absolutely wonderful bit with flags at 4:30:
Short of web standardization, how should a language picker be designed for a website where presumably the main design goal is a non-default-language speaking user can pick out their language?
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
You can use the iso code of the language itself as an abbreviation, with the name of the language in that target language next to it. The iso code is OK to use if you need a short “icon” for the language. There is a few standard icons representing “Translation” if you need iconography for the idea of a language switcher, too.
EN - English
FR - Français
RU - Русский
1 days ago [-]
DiggyJohnson 2 days ago [-]
Fair alternative, but would this not be much less recognizable on the page to a non-native speaker of the default language? What if you have so many locales that a menu or drop down is required? This does not seem to me like it’s a better solution, it just has different downsides.
scrollaway 2 days ago [-]
Depends the kind of website you are looking at. But yes, my personal preference is to use the translation icon (it looks similar to the one used for Google and Apple translate apps), and next to it, the currently selected iso code. Then in the dropdown, as a list, what I mentioned above.
DiggyJohnson 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for the explanation. The translation icon is one of those things I didn't realize I was already familiar with.
draw_down 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
slig 2 days ago [-]
Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.
cdrini 2 days ago [-]
Hmm I'm a bit confused by your question. Emojis are a Unicode range, and the only way Unicode is displayed on a monitor is through -- a font. So just like with text, if a website doesn't load it's own font, the OS-level fonts are used. I'm not sure what the alternative would be.
slig 2 days ago [-]
Sorry, I now see my question was poorly worded. I was ranting about OS vendors not updating emoji fonts on supported versions -- you have to upgrade to the latest major version to get new emojis. I ran into this issue twice when using an older, and supported, version of both macOS and Android.
kccqzy 1 days ago [-]
It is definitely a strategy for Apple to increase uptake of their non x.0 releases.
jagged-chisel 2 days ago [-]
…or install a font with support
Rendered at 22:51:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.sv...
https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internati...
With some CSS you can make it indistinguishable from an icon
I feel like a globe icon is much more obvious.
Screenshot in case HN strips the Unicode: https://i.imgur.com/yeLxyOe.jpeg
And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)
It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode.
(yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)
Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak.
Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak.
> because the orthography movement failed in the 70s
It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”.
For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading.
They're just different words¹.
____
¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.
It's really annoying when they give you a loong list of countries or languages and you have to scroll through it until you get two pages past the target, then scroll back slowly until you get to one page before the target, repeat until you finally have it in sight...
What I tend to do is have a dropdown with a country icon and language name localized to that language for each language. My pet peeve is trying to switch a website from a language I don't speak into one I do speak and the dropdown listing "Dutch" as "Néerlandais" or whatever instead of "Nederlands". I don't speak french, why would I know what dutch is called in french?
(and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)
Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.
As a native German speaker, who never learnt Dutch, I can tell you that I understand nl-NL a lot better than de-CH. There is a reason de-CH is subtiteled in German media.
As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/
I do think it might be conceptually possible and intellectually funny to come with flags that are generated from some pattern that some corpus of languages exhibit. Be it sui generis through some LLM, or relying more on scholar lexical/syntactic categorizations, or even something really more trivial like using a language-code[1] as entry.
On the other hand, with such an approach I’m afraid that chances are low that we can gain any adherence and a large recognition of the resulting flags from their speakers.
To my mind the best approaches as of today where already exposed in this thread: something best effort to propose the most likely user recognizable language and a clearly visible option to open a locale selector. If iconography seems a must have in the UI, showing something like a A/あ icon is rather usual by now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_code
You need just one icon to open the locale selector, and possibly an other one giving feedback of which one is currently applied. For the latter using a language code looks like a realistic option:
EN
US
FR
BE
This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false positive all of a sudden.
Chrome could at least expose support like other feature detection APIs, even if they don't go so far as to provide the flags, to avoid this ridiculous heuristic approach.
Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer.
Unicode has decided flags shouldn’t be part of Unicode.
There are a few flag emoji that got included before they reached that decision and there are “regional indicator symbols” that often get displayed as flags, but that’s it. They won’t, for example, include flags of cantons of Liechtenstein.
See https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag....
https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm...
You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories'
https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?
Flags are Political Symbols. ISO Country Codes are not. People rally around flags. Flag color symbolize beliefs/ideals. Flag crests and images contain political messages. ISO Country Codes are just a couple of letters that might (but not necessarily do) reflect a Country Name.
It's generally not just "don't want the country acknowledged", it's "don't want dissidents rallying to that flag". For instance, the parts of China that believe Taiwan is and always shall be a part of China don't have a problem with naming Taiwan as such, they see that as the "province name"; they do have a problem with the national flag of Taiwan, which intentionally represents and symbolizes its independence from China.
I can't blame Microsoft for not wanting to support flags. Politics are hard. Flags can be the hard mode of Political Symbols.
(Also Microsoft's stance is interesting in the way that it came from that Windows 95-era map-based Time Zone picker. The number of lawsuits they had over effectively "single pixel" border disputes was absurd. Flags are way more political than borders.)
Even if very few of the lawsuits actually escalate to violence or war, is any risk of violence/war worth it? Ethics would suggest "all my competitors are doing it" isn't a great answer here, either, and certainly doesn't remove the risk.
I can respect the "no lawsuits at all" preference here.
I see your point that flags elicit a different reaction out of people than territorial classifications, but simultaneously it seems to be the classification which elicits disagreement. "You can call it a country so long as you don't assign a flag" seems like the wrong place to draw a line in the sand.
Presumably, provinces can have flags!!
Windows also doesn't have an "ISO Country Code Picker" here. They don't provide tools to make flag emoji at all.
Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.
You are a web browser, not an operating system. Stay in your lane.
To me this just isn't worth the cost.
Sidenote, I'm the maintainer of the polyfill for this and its little script that extracts just the country flags from Mozilla's Twemoji font [0]. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but if it's in any way helpful that I chime into that Chromium bug then let me know. I'd love to deprecate the polyfill.
[0] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/m...
Chrome relies on the os certs.
I think that's the correct way how software should works.
>Standardizing the set of CAs trusted by Chrome across platforms through the transition to the Chrome Root Store, coupled with a consistent certificate verification experience through the use of the Chrome Certificate Verifier, will result in more consistent user and developer experiences.
https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrom...
Wait. I thought Windows has ClearType which could render black text on white background using colors. And furthermore there is a wizard to allow users to adjust how much ClearType adjustment there is. This feels like a totally incorrect solution.
And apparently starting from 2021 Microsoft Edge did in fact begin to use ClearText according to this article https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-fon... from Microsoft. So the author's approach would be broken in Microsoft Edge since 2021.
https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/5...
Just randomly sharing, the part of the trick I like the most is that it renders the emojis scaled down to a 1x1 canvas, so it renders just a single pixel. That makes checking stuff like "am i not accidentally reading in the transparent area of the glyph" and stuff like that no problem, because the whole emoji is blurred down to a single pixel.
The author's example is a bit weird in this regard, it does the same trick (set the canvas width and height to 1), and then it still loops through all 1 pixels and discards any transparent ones.
This is so real.
Ask about Fibonacci? Great.
Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs
Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
Not everyone has the time or the inclination to keep a stable of local llms (and update them regularly, for example). Some people have other hobbies.
> Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
What? It's been years since a regular search got you anything but spam from the usual tutorial farms.
The prompt I used isn't a particularly good search query, and I got:
What am I missing?[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Why+would+flag+emojis+render...
In Bing Maps, I expect them change country borders based on localization settings, but that was probably too onerous to implement and test in the Windows 95 days.
They didn't actually remove the map - they just removed any functionality it had. So the time set window is massive for no reason, it contains this huge world map bitmap that no longer does anything.
It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al.
The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.
Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
Yandex censorship around this is really amusing. They did indeed drop all mentions of countries and borders everywhere, for one thing. But also in Alice (their LLM chatbot), it's to the point where if you ask it to prepare a road trip from Sochi to Bucharest and describe the route in detail including which countries it passes through, it refuses to answer.
As far as I know, no it’s not? (Haven’t been to Russia for about a year now, but I haven’t heard about any blocks from my friends.)
> if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-deter...
You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.
No, in a disputed territory there's one reality, and 1..n delusions.
Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use.
2) Maps apps are probably going to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago.
Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.
I’m not even one to defend the PRC, but between the PRC, the Republic of China, Korea, Japan, and Russia there’s a lot of land and naming disputes between them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/01/28/gulf-mexico-g...
Nice writeup btw. I still can't get over how ridiculous it is that Windows doesn't have country flags emojis. It just means that every app/website ends up applying a hacky patch like this.
The author mentions a polyfill [1] and the fact that they dislike it's using a CDN. Fortunately, the polyfill can be configured to use a local/self-hosted font:
> polyfillCountryFlags(fontName?: string, fontUrl?: string)
Here's how I added it to my Astro landing page: https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631...
[1] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill
I haven't tested with emojis (never thought of it, great test case!) but try Fontimize, which creates font subsets based on text your site actually uses. It runs over the HTML and CSS and creates an applicable subset.
But the Python API supports passing just some specific text. Try using that, passing any and every flag you wish. You should be able to get a font file that contains just the country flags this way.
I really need to get back to this library and add predefined subsets like, say, extended Latin, or country flags!
https://github.com/vintagedave/Fontimize
Looks like the flags-only font is just 77 kb!
During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag.
These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus.
I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag.
_____________
¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time.
Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.
If you ship android as-is from a GIT repo that has <forbidden thing> you can be ok. If you write an app or show slideware which refers to <forbidden thing> you are in the naughty corner for a while.
It's because people who are responding are responding intelligently. They know what they can effect: the future. The past, is another country. They can't get the git repo to ban the <forbidden thing> but they can make your life hell for including it.
So to an outsider this looks "inconsistent" but its (in my opinion) entirely internally consistent: Only act on things you can influence.
Microsoft would not respond to North Korea by deleting all the unicode flags all over the world, so while that might get you closer to the essence of your question, there's no point in me asking my question if you are just going to dodge it.
> can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?
I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is.
Or more simply: no, this is not just because of China and Taiwan.
https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
This list notably doesn't have Quebec, Northern Ireland, or Somaliland. But it does have Taiwan and Palestinian Territories.
you have failed to convince me that this is about quebec, somalililand or palestine, those are absurd notions, so you have failed to convince me that this is not about china.
(Of course it won't really be about any one thing, it will be about all of these things - and China is probably the biggest and most relevant case. But it's by no means the only one)
I try to start a subthread about perhaps an alternative idea, and I get responses that are all about the same blather that's already everywhere else. People here have no intellectual subtlety: I wouldn't bother commenting to elicit responses that are all the same thing that's already here. Try to say something different. Make a case.
(and if you know anything about the history of Microsoft and Israel, no, it's not about Palestine. Ask any Israeli on here, did Microsoft drop flag emojis because of Israeli sensitivities?)
The "reddit terminology" for this is /r/iamverysmart . If everyone else understands your comment a different way from the way you intended it, maybe it's not that they're all stupid, maybe you didn't express yourself very well.
And that's how you construct an argument.
I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.
It is the communist that ceded a lot of territory to the Soviet Union and the puppet state of Mongolia to appease the USSR by having a buffer between it and china
Like when the PRC threatened invasion when the UK wanted Hong Kong to elect its own leaders, then later they can turn around and say "the British never even let the Hong Kong people vote".
Some with Taiwan / R.O.C and it's territorial claims.
Denialism is demented. But it's not chinese denialism that's the problem. It's the denialism by the side that lost the civil war.
> It's not that they just claim Taiwan - they pretend they already own it, and stick their fingers in their ears if you point out facts on the ground.
They won the civil war. It's their territory.
> I suppose they did the same with Mongolia, until they couldn't.
The mongols are the ones that conquered china. Think you got your histories mixed up.
What's with your obsession with taiwan?
Not that it matters, because legitimacy of holding territory is not based on winning wars.
They won the civil war, just like the vietnamese won their war of independence against france. It's just that china, like vietnam, needs to win another war. The war against the US to fully liberate their nation like vietnam did.
> Not that it matters, because legitimacy of holding territory is not based on winning wars.
Sure it is. It's the wars we won against britain, spain, mexico, japan, etc that gained all our territory. You think spain gave up florida, mexico gave up texas and japan gave up the pacific islands because they were feeling generous? Winning wars is what ultimately decides who owns what. The past 500 years has been europeans winning wars and stealing land all over the world. Actually, all of human history is people taking territory by force. Actually, this also applies to lions, wolves and ants.
The reason china doesn't control taiwan is because they chickened out and decided not to fight the US for taiwan. The chinese should look to india for some inspiration. Know why goa is part of india again? India forcibly took it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Goa
Doesn't help that most emoji fonts render all flags in the same aspect ratio.
Why not simply collect all the prevalent "stances" on the disputed topics, and give the user to choose on each stance individually (or for a better user experience: create some presets of "stances that often occur together", which the user can use to activate multiple stances at once).
"Is the island to the east of mainland China (also known as Taiwan, or Chinese Taipei) part of the People's Republic of China?"
"What is the legal status of Gibraltar?"
"Who ought to have won the Cod Wars?"
And on, and on...
Alternatively, have your pick of
"Western (standard)"
"Western (tankie)"
"Chinese (the big one)"
"Chinese (the small, disputed one)"
"American (pro-Iceland)"
"American (pro-UK, for the purpose of the Cod Wars)"
"British (Still Irritated Over Suez)"
"British ('What's Suez?')"
Your idea is quite sensible, of course, but you could make it quite absurd if you liked. Perhaps I'll put something like this together one evening. I'm sure there are more silly disagreements to include than the ones I know of as a brit.
Sigh.. I'm so sick of companies pandering to bad regimes. This, google displaying the south china sea as part of china locally, meta dropping their DEI program after trump took over. None of the companies I know showing pride flags in Arab countries on their website during pride month (while of course widely proclaiming their support in PR and internal material everywhere else). It's all so fake. Stick by your values, then we stick by you as a customer.
That seems like it wouldn't work the way you're meaning in some pretty common cases. For example, with the Russian language.
Funny you say that, considering it originally was an actual gun, then companies progressively changed it to a water gun until it was the defacto standard. I guess if something got changed for "woke" reasons, and it sticks around long enough, you can dunk on the guy changing it back for being "anti-woke"?
Just playing devil’s advocate but I kind of get it
If there was a separatist region you felt wasn’t legitimate or entirely delusional in both their existence and their aims, and third parties started giving them legitimacy with flags that your former neighbor made up at night, you would be like “cmon, wtf, cut that out”
obviously I can’t relate to this in any way, but I could imagine it could occur the longer I live
I think we're taking emoji way too seriously in average. Perhaps we should start including popular flag propositions that got shut down by the officials (like the Australian flag redesign contest) just to make it clear that emoji are just words and nothing more.
They're all kind of silly though. If you want an image use <img>...
Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region?
Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it).
Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the ukrainian flag in their old writings replaced with russian ones after a software update. Feels like something out of 1984.
This is going pretty well, but seems tedious, so for all other cases let's just merge ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 639-1 as follows:
And if they don't speak Afrikaans in Afghanistan or Arabic in Argentina then you'll have to take it up with the International Organization for Standardization.In population, no, the GP is correct.
What about colonial nations like the US or most of South America. Do the native languages not get a symbol because a colonial history resulted in a foreign language being the dominant one?
The Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation both have flags to use that could theoretically be incorporated into Unicode if they didn't draw the line at National flags, but you could always draw flag representations in SVG instead.
But I also think this discussion has gone so far into the theoretical it's kind of ignored a very practical point: how many languages do you need to present in your software, because your software is actually localized in that language? Most software isn't going beyond the top two or three recognized languages in a given UN-recognized country (and even some of those are relatively obscure), and countries that have >1 languages usually share an official language with another country that uses it more predominantly. At this point in time, the economies of scale do not favor actually localizing software in 1600 different languages, so we don't. At all.
In fact, the usual pattern for developers from Europe and the Americas is to favor their dominant language and localizing in other dominant languages that originated in Europe and some of their more popular variants, and then maybe also some combination of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu, and Korean.
So when you're presented with a number of languages and variants exceeding 30 in a list, flags probably aren't going to cut it anymore, but there's still some design space to use flags as language representations if you want.
There are over 30 languages in India with at least a million NATIVE speakers. 7 of those are in the top 30 most spoken languages in the world
Npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-lang-selecta Source code: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta
Just let me choose ‘Netherlands - English’ and I’ll be on my way, please and thanks.
No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages.
No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names.
No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages.
For the most common languages, flags are fine.
Edit: I'm amused by the amount of replies that assume the only context that ever requires symbolic language representation is websites. Awesome, how do I add one of your JavaScript language drop-downs to a physical product label? Or an airline steward's name tag?
As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid.
Not to mention for all those languages that are not the majority language in any country.
As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.
> Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words.
The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?
As an australian, when was the last time the Australian flag was the incorrect choice for you? I'm going to guess never.
Crimean Tartars, by the way, are a great example of a people that have their own flag, despite that flag not being the official flag of any independent nation-state. If someone is a speaker of Crimean Tartar, and working with Ukrainian refugees, they should add that flag to their name tag too.
Seeing as you say you care about getting services to those people, let’s talk about putting your money where your keyboard is. Reach out via my profile and let me know how much you’d like to contribute.
You could talk about your experience, but you're not doing that.
And the claims they made about how much they care were not extreme. "Putting their money where their keyboard is" could be accomplished with $10. Would $10 make you happy or settle anything at all?
The above conversation is a good example of this. Ukrainian people are very patriotic especially now, and flags are a highly symbolic and meaningful subject. And not wanting to listen to “just don’t use a flag for languages”, which is a ridiculously simple ask, to then pretend it’s not a big deal for those who lost their homes and families?
GP has no idea what it’s like to be be in the exact case they claim to care about. So yes, I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate those who don’t listen to the simplest asks.
Your experience with flag use.
Your experience with people claiming to care about Ukraine isn't relevant because the above user only claimed that they care about it significantly more than a thing they don't care about. That's a super weak claim.
You're twisting it into a major claim so you can put them down for failing to live up to your standards of caring, when it was only a relative comparison.
> GP has no idea what it’s like
Which you are not trying to remedy. You are only trying to prove they don't care enough, as if that's going to somehow prove their original claim about flag use incorrect.
> I’ll take $10 for some drone parts, instead of trying to educate
Instead of? Does that mean no explanation even if you get them to donate?
> those who don’t listen to the simplest ask
Simple doesn't mean correct. Both sides of this argument are simple.
As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.
But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.
I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...
But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.
The colour-based representation on their flag is similar to ours too, but with the colours reversed.
I did not know that. Always assumed there was a standard aspect ratio for flags.
However, this is another reason why flags aren't a good choice for languages. It works for some of the main languages - German, French, etc. where there's a clear one to one link between originating country's flag and language.
It's less clear for English - the UK flag, the US flag, the Irish flag and apparently even the Canadian flag gets used.
It's basically impossible to choose a flag for minority languages, and many countries have multiple official and widely spoken unofficial languages. What flag should represent Balinese, for example?
I don't have a better solution, and if your site is translated to just a couple of languages it's fine. But I guess as machine translation gets closer to perfect and very cheap, it'll become more common to have lots of translations.
Unicode makes this hard (though it does provide the Welsh flag) but in principle you could solve this for some minority languages. For instance if you wanted to support Catalan, just use the flag of Catalonia, since they have one. You don’t need to have a country to have a flag, and you don’t need to have a country for your flag to become part of Unicode. Unicode has the transgender flag for instance. For Balinese maybe I would just use the flag of Bali.
But if someone said "I'm from Ireland", you should assume they speak English as their main language. Even if they say "I speak Irish", there's a high chance they're not fully fluent, it's an identity thing for many Irish people.
In any case, it's probably best not to read too much in to this. The whole point is that using flags to represent languages risks getting caught up in exactly this kind of minutiae.
The text EN is unique for English and removes all for it. Put a flag next to the text if you like.
obviously the British flag is for the least controversial option, Ulster Scots.
I don't see what the problem with that is. Universally understandable to anyone who knows the written version of their language
There's also a search bar for filtering and it works with either the native or foreign name of the language. So, for example, typing "Finnish", "Suomi" or "Fines" (the latter is even misspelled, should be "Finés") will all filter out the right language.
Of course, there may be an edge case that's missing, but it's as close as perfect as it can get without reading the user's mind.
And it doesn't have to have every single language. There's over 7,000 languages in the world. It just needs to have languages for which content exists. For the vast vast majority of Wikipedia articles there are less than 10 languages available
Take a look at tesla.com. The shitty CEO aside, the language/locale menu does it right: An understandable globe icon opens a menu, that menu is sorted by continents, countries and for those countries languages - with their name written in their local script.
Yes, every language has a name and you can use that. If you prefer an imprecise flag over the actual name of the language then what you're saying is that you prefer style over substance. There's always space to show the language name.
Ideograms are fine so long as they can be replaced with a canonical word or phrase and still make sense.
Flags for languages fails that in many cases around the world- if I want to select Quebecoise French, neither the Canadian, French, or Quebec Province flags are appropriate.
Likewise, Switzerland has no official language, and many countries such as Belgium have multiple.
I frequently travel in places where I don’t speak the primary language — and having to hunt down a menu in a language I can’t read sounds a lot worse than having a flag I know visible on the main page.
Symbols are useful. You can quibble over the symbols chosen (they don't seem to do a lot of physical weighing in courts?), but that is fundamentally besides the point, which is 'how do I convey this widely understood concept in a limited amount of space?'.
I know that they have flaws. The problem is, there isn't any better pictorial representation, and they work well enough that it's better than not having one.
For some languages they work very well (e.g. Swedish), for others there may technically be ambiguity but it's clear enough (e.g. the Union Jack for English), and some are more difficult and rely on convention (e.g. the Egyptian flag for Arabic).
The landing page (https://nuenki.app) has a cloud of flags of the supported languages. It's an information dense, easy to scan way of seeing whether your language is supported. Sure, it's not technically 100% accurate, but what's the alternative?
Then of course the multitude of languages spoken in many european languages such as Spain (catalan, gallician, basque). Or the latin american variation.
Or what about Switzerland who dont have their own language (they speak french, german, italian and romanch).
Even your example of Sweden is naive, as we have Swedish, Finnish, Sapmi, Meänkieli and I would argue Älvdalska is another proper language too, even if it dont have official status.
Its a very flawed idea and no matter how pretty it may look, it cant map to reality and is just misleading at best.
Nuenki supports European Spanish (though now you mention it, I ought to make that clearer). If it were American Spanish, I'd probably use Mexico. I handle Portuguese that way.
Switzerland is easy, because I have no need to include their flag. German is covered by Germany (yes, I know of Austria), French by France, etc.
And I'm highly unlikely to add Romansh, if only because it'd be very difficult to translate with good quality. I would if I could though, I find it fascinating. For a flag, I'd find an online Romansh community and ask what flag people would find most respectful + representative, or if people would prefer I forgo it.
You argue that it's misleading. I see where you're coming from. It isn't perfectly explicit and unambiguous. However, I don't think it's misleading in practice.
Nobody looks at a Spanish flag and thinks it's denoting Catalan - I'd probably use a regional flag there - nor do people look at a Union Jack or an American flag and go "no idea what that's for". When looking to see if Nuenki supports Finnish, nobody looks for the Swedish flag. They look for the Finnish flag.
People know what the stereotypical flags are, particularly when they're learning that language.
So imo it's about absolute precision vs UX, and the UX of reading through a textual list of languages is awful. It's a complete pain to scan through without any kind of visual indicator. That's why, in practice, everyone uses flags.
I didn't previously use flags so widely. Adding them everywhere (e.g. the dropdowns on the demo) was a result of feedback from people who felt it would make it nicer to use. Also, they're generally alongside the full name (aside from the aforementioned cloud), to clear up any ambiguity.
Curious, do Indian websites just never use flags then?
Or do they use flags for the states within India?
Because at a quick glance, it seems like there is a general mapping of languages to one or more states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_union_territories_o...
Very similar to the world situation.
Having grown up in the South, the Stars and Bars would be a depressingly popular choice.
German -> Germany, French -> France, Swedish -> Sweden.
It's not perfect, but 99% of times it communicates what is meant to communicate, which is more than what you can say of many icons.
You will have a hard time, even on Wikipedia.
For most people, flags absolutely are the best shorthand for the language of the same name.
Not to mention the software is translated into more (you can go to preferences to see the full list), wikipedia just makes the practical decision that there is no point having british, american and canadian english as separate projects, but you can chose any of them for the software interface (interestingly there are separate wikipedia projects for https://sco.wikipedia.org https://jam.wikipedia.org and https://ang.wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia has more languages then there are countries.
It may be technically correct, but it's pretty obvious to people what it means. It's extremely common.
It's clear that English originates from the UK and Portuguese originates from Portugal. Not to mention that sites often do have country variants -- the Brazilian Portuguese gets the Brazilian flag. And if a site is only for US and Mexican customers, a US flag makes sense rather than UK because it'll also use US currency.
And a flag icon also helps your eye quickly find the localization drop-down mixed in with a bunch of other stuff in the footer.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages
There aren't really existing unambiguous language icons, at least for the majority of languages, so it'd be less about making them a formal emoji and more about actually inventing + "legitimising" new icons so they can be broadly and uncontroversially used.
I doubt that'd happen in practice - there just isn't a pressing need, and you'd need an enormous (and likely controversial) public education campaign to make them adoptable - but it would be a neat design problem. r/vexillogy would have a field day.
If I come across a site that is not in English, but I see a little flag somewhere, that is a very good indicator that that's the place I can go and change the language to English.
(Happens a lot more when you're travelling in a non-English-speaking country.)
It's one of those "yes technically you're right, but actually it still works really well in practice so sod off" things. It's like saying tomatoes should be in the fruit aisle. No thanks. Sometimes utility is more important than anal correctness.
I feel obliged to point out that majority of engineers get stuck in 3-hour-long meeting discussing corner cases "is Okinawan a separate language" or "what even is a language", while refusing to address the business problem at hand, which is "I want my European user to pick between Italian, French and Spanish". I used to enjoy these "yes but technically no" discussions, but then I understood they never lead anywhere, because they're about solving the problem in some imaginary world that only exists in some people's heads, rather than the real one.
The truth is that there exist situations where using country flags is effective means of communicating the idea of a language. You might not like it, but that's how it works.
Says who?
Probably not the actual users of websites, I'd wager.
E.g., Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English.
Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
It's a pain to phrase, but: There is no reason to use the Swiss flag to indicate a language. French has the French flag. German has the German flag. Etc. There are dialects, as a nuance to this, but you can solve that by e.g. using a 50/50 merge of the German and Swiss flags.
Countries may have ambiguous languages, but _languages very rarely have ambiguous countries_. Sure, there are Finnish speakers in Sweden, but the Swedish flag remains a clear indicator of the Swedish language.
Hindi and India is the main exception to this. Arabic is also difficult, though Egypt seems to have a slight edge by convention.
> UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades
I sympathise, and if they have any better ideas than a textual list that users need to read through rather than quickly scan (not very good UX...), I'd love to hear them. From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?
Okay, which flag do you use to indicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language — one of the four official languages of Switzerland?
> From a _UX perspective_, is there something better than the flag cloud at https://nuenki.app for quickly asking "is my target language supported"?
That flag cloud is actually hard for me to parse because where am I supposed to look for italian? I did find it, but I literally had to do a sequential scan because there's no apparent order to them. I would use a combo box searchable by: ISO language code, language name in english, language name in native language and script. It's clear what it's asking for, pretty much everyone is going to know at least one of the things it's asking for, it's not completely ascii centric. Flags can be added for some visual flair, and if you actually distinguish between (i.e. have different versions for) en-US and en-GB and en-SG, more power to you.
Tangential nit: nuenki.app shows the SPQR flag for (presumably) latin, but in the Language dropdown it's Latin (Classical) :classical_building::eagle:. Argh.
[1] https://book.health.gov.sg/
Switzerland seems pretty easy -- French, German and Italian get the obvious flags, while Romansh gets either the Swiss flag or the Grisons flag. No?
> Also, UX/UI designers have rightfully been banging the "don't use country flags to indicate languages" drum for literally decades, now. We dealt with this issue in the 90s.
So it kind of seems to me like they've lost. They might be banging the drum, but in the real world the flags are useful.
But why does it have to concern some Finnish online store that also has English and Swedish as options? Do their actual users really care? Because that is the litmus test, not the opinion of someone writing a blog.
Or are you claiming that they don't know what the French or German flags look like?
Despite two wars in our history, it does not bother me.
Because it's a language selection screen for fucks sake, I'm not marrying anything, or committing to a lifelong alliance.
If selecting the "wrong" flag makes you feel anything other than the mildest annoyance, seek professional mental help.
What sold me to subscribe to his channel is this absolutely wonderful bit with flags at 4:30:
https://youtu.be/iQNdkdqoIdw?t=4m29s
Flags aren’t languages. Listen to your elders.