Not necessarily. It completely depends on the situation.
As another example: gendered bathrooms. The icons used on gendered bathrooms have a woman wearing a skirt, and a man wearing trousers. These icons are "wrong": a man can wear a skirt, and a woman can wear trousers (in fact, nowadays most women do). It's nonetheless certainly more useful to have a "wrong" icon than none at all in this case.
Bathrooms need icons because they have to assume users who can't read, or don't know the local language. None of these two problems apply to language selection 99.9999% of the time: if you can't read, you can't use a system based on reading no matter the language, and if you don't recognize the name of a language in a list, you also do not want to select it.
Quite obviously you never interacted with any software which defaults to the language you can't read, despite having a support for the language you do understand.
How would flags in the language selection help? The actual problem is finding the language selection at all (which still has an icon of a (stylised) globe on MacOS).
Language select used to have a flag of current language. Political correctness might have made companies change that convention making it hard to find as you say, but it used to be that you looked for flags to find the language setting.
I remember windows having flags for the languages, but now it is a strange A symbol that I have no clue what it is and I'd have no chance of finding if it was in the wrong language.
I wouldn't personally think of that as a "wrong symbol" though – it's just an anachronistic representation used to establish a visual representation of an abstract concept.
I'd be concerned if I saw a save button with a printer icon on it though – they're both recognisably computer peripherals but they're definitely not interchangeable!
I'm not sure it is. Symbols operate by analogy, all language does.
The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak". If you're living in the UK and are given the choice between Denmark and Australia, the latter is the more similar.
> The question isn't "where are you from", but "which country speaks a language that is similar to how you speak"
Exactly. And that's the problem. There are countries where more than one language are officially spoken and differ (in the case of German enough that neither German nor Austrian German are usable, whereas German German is usable for Austrian German and vice versa) and these languages do not have their own flag - like Swiss German or Swiss Italian or Swiss French or do not have a flag in total, like (Swiss) Romansch.
And no, Switzerland isn't the only "problematic" country and Romansch isn't the only language without a flag.
This is only an issue if the flag is the only information provided. In the case of the Swiss languages, you could use the Swiss flag for all for all of them, or only for the languages that are unique to Switzerland.
Words do not have to be unique in language. You can lead an army and you can lead water in a lead pipe.
> This is only an issue if the flag is the only information provided.
The next step is acknowledging that the flag doesn't contribute anything, but may cause confusion or negative associations with the flag's country. So what exactly is the point of using it at all?
One very useful property of flags is that the flag is the same in any language, even if the names for the languages are not.
Having a colorful icon is also helpful if you have problems reading text. Means you don't have to read all the languages' names that are on screen, you can do a coarse visual match by colors and then confirm by only reading the one name.
Modern low contrast monochrome flat UIs are a nightmare for people with reading disabilities and low-grade sight impairment. Speaking from my own experience. A dab of color does so much to help parse a UI. It doesn't have to be the perfect representation or unambiguous. Just give me something to help navigate the UI that isn't just monochrome text possibly with monochrome line-art icons.
Oh, yes, that's why I wrote that the language must be written in the native language and additionally contain the translated name. And _every_ long list of text should be searchable (for the native and the translated name).
The problem is that a list of languages has no alphabetical order because different languages use different scripts and there is no standard order of scripts (yes there is Unicode, no relying on your users knowing the order of scripts in Unicode is not good UI design). So there is no way to order a list of languages so that someone can binary search them like they would a dictionary.
Which comes first: Ελληνικά, العربية, Русский, or 日本語?
Flags assist by giving a second piece of information that can be used to identify the right language easier. They still perform this function even if the wrong flag is used. You can scan a list of flags with names faster than you can scan a list of weird unfamiliar language names.
Swiss German is German. It gets a German flag. Swiss French is French. It gets a French flag.
As a Brit you get used to American flags to denote English. It's just not a big deal. I mean I even use US English most of the time as I prefer the keyboard layout.
Barely any languages exist in the world without an associated country. You're looking for a problem where none exists. Romansh has like 50,000 speakers and a ton of those probably use something different on their computers anyway. But even there the clear and obvious choice is the Swiss flag.
This is an unbelievably ignorant comment. As someone else pointed out, Swiss German is not the same as German and there are many (widely spoken) languages that are spoken in many different countries as there are many countries where many different languages are spoken.
The entire point of TFA is that there isn’t a simple mapping between flags of countries and languages so we should probably stop trying to create one.
> Back in my day we all had to use ASCII, etc etc.
And it turned out that this assumption was a bad one hence the need for Unicode. Why make the same mistake again?
Swiss German is not German. It is a language kinda similar to German. Bit, if you studied German and can get by in Germany, you will still be clueless in Switzerland
And if you are a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who has to pick the Russian flag? Or an Irish person who has to pick the Union Flag? Not even the English flag, because nobody actually uses that for the English language, but the Union Flag!
This isn’t an abstract technicality, forcing people to use the wrong flag can trigger some very strong negative emotions if you get it wrong.
The only time the Ukrainian would have to pick the Russian flag would surely be if they selected the Russian language, and not the Ukrainian language which is not the same as Russian and doesn't even use the same alphabet. The languages and alphabets are undeniably similar and somewhat mutually intelligible, but they are not the same.
Only time this is a problem is when the Ukrainian localization isn't even supported and the Ukrainians are forced to use Russian, but then isn't that the bigger problem?
I know Ukrainian and Russian are different languages, that’s why I specified “a Russian-speaking Ukrainian”. Plenty of Ukrainians are native Russian speakers.
While the Russian-speaking Ukrainians would indeed speak "like the Russians", I'd at least go off the limb and say that they'd probably prefer to have their native language in the UI represented as something like "Русский" instead of the Russian flag. Like if we were to ask a randomly picked Russian speaking Ukrainian like, say, Volodymyr Zelenskyy about how he'd feel about his native language being represented by the Russian flag, I could imagine him being sort of annoyed by that even if he'd probably understand the reason behind the choice.
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I feel that like many other people I'm this thread, it'd probably be better to have the language be represented as itself in the "Select language"-menu instead of relying on flags. It would be more accessible, allow for choosing different dialects of the same language, avoid faux pas like the aforementioned thing with Russian-speaking Ukrainiand, and so on. Of course you'd also want a translated name of the language in the UI which would correspond to the current UI language, but having the language there in its native form is a must.
It really isn’t. You presumably live in a country. That country has a flag. If you click that flag, there is a high chance you’ll get a language you understand - and if you don’t, you probably already know the reason and how to fix it (diaspora, multi-lingual country etc.). A few easy-to-address edge cases are no basis to fuck up everyone else’s experience.
I speak Russian, I don't live in Russia. Never have, never was a citizen of. Why the hell do I have to select the flag of Russia if I want to use something in Russian?
Because it is a convenient universally understood symbol. Why does the letter W have the shape it has? I don’t care, but I know what it stands for as do all other people who speak English.
The largest diaspora in the world (India’s) has 30 million people, and most of them (18M) are immigrants. I have trouble believing more than 1% of people worldwide would prefer something other than one of the national languages of the country in which they were raised.
But my point is more like, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Your frustration with the Russian flag is justified, but so is the frustration of everyone else having to read through dozens of entries, possibly in a foreign language.
I live in Switzerland and I’m very used to seeing 3 to five options with a Swiss flag: German, French, Italian, English, Romansh (rarely). I don’t see it as a wrong use of the flag.
One is the locale and the other is the language. The flag serves as a lookup index.
Now, sure, in some cases, like the Gatwick example in the site, that is wrong/questionable.
> There are some curious flag choices made for representing languages: such as Andorra for Catalan. With a population of around 80,000, there are are fewer people in Andorra than the seating capacity of Catalonia’s largest football ground, FC Barcelona’s Nou Camp (almost 100,000 people).
But flags can be a good help for people with some linguistic/reading difficulties (besides the issues when you need to find the 'switch language' option in an unknown (to you) language.
