Flags Are Not Languages

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Convenience and Familiarity of Flags

  • Many see flags as effective visual shortcuts in language pickers and menus.
  • Users recognize their own national flags quickly, aiding scanning of long lists or controller-based UIs with limited text entry.
  • Flags are a long-standing convention in software UIs, especially for finding the language settings.
  • Colorful icons help some people with reading difficulties or low vision quickly orient in otherwise text-heavy, low-contrast interfaces.

Why Flags Are a Poor Proxy for Languages

  • Core critique: countries and languages do not map 1:1.
    • Multilingual countries (e.g., Switzerland, India) and multinational languages (English, French, Arabic, Russian, etc.) make any choice arbitrary.
    • Dialects and regional standards (Swiss German vs German, Canadian vs UK vs US English) are hard to represent.
  • Political and historical issues:
    • Colonized populations may resent selecting former colonizers’ flags for their everyday language.
    • Diaspora speakers or minorities (Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Belarusians, Irish English speakers) may reject the associated state flag.
  • Some argue “wrong symbols everywhere” is fine if useful; others insist that mislabeling identity is qualitatively worse than a missing icon.

Alternatives Proposed

  • Show language names in their own script plus the current UI language; avoid flags entirely.
  • Use generic icons: globe, “文A”, UN flag, or custom “language symbols” rather than national symbols.
  • Apple-style 2-letter ISO language codes as icons get some praise, though code readability for non-technical users is questioned.
  • “Language flags” (custom per language) exist but don’t scale cleanly and may still be ambiguous.

Language Selection Mechanics

  • Strong support for respecting browser/OS Accept-Language, with a visible override on the site.
  • Complaints that many sites ignore Accept-Language and instead geolocate by IP, often producing unreadable defaults.
  • Some users need per-site or per-context language choices (e.g., native language for general browsing, English for technical docs).
  • Kiosk/shared computers make per-user language toggles in the UI valuable regardless of system settings.

Accessibility and Learnability

  • Some icons (like Wikipedia’s 文A) are opaque without explanation; flags are more self-explanatory for many.
  • Others find flag-free UIs (e.g., Apple’s updated picker) harder to visually parse, while some find them cleaner and more correct.
  • Consensus: any solution must balance clarity, accessibility, political sensitivity, and existing user expectations.