Using Flags to represent Languages considered problematic

Open Forum
24

I strongly prefer the flags. It’s not perfect, but it is both fairly accurate and educational.

In the case of India or a similar country, if Hindi or another language located within an already-represented country (Scots Gaelic in the UK, for example) gets added later, it should also have the national flag. Users are pretty smart and will quickly figure it out.

26

Can you just leave politics out of it?

27

I do think this is a legitimate issue for certain languages.

The Indian flag representing Gujarati is the most obvious problem, since that is not the language most immediately associated with the whole of India (that would most likely be Hindi). There is likely to be confusion should languages such as Hindi or Tamil be added in the future.

This issue is sometimes resolved by blending the different flags, often diagonally separated, such as UK/US, or Portugal/Brazil (LingQ does it, in this case!). Of course, that doesn’t account for languages spoken in many countries, perhaps most obviously Spanish. Blending e.g. Spain and Mexico would only highlight the exclusion of other countries even more.

One observation I would make is that LingQ already does make somewhat political choices in their flags: e.g. Belarusian is represented by a flag associated with the opposition, rather than the arguably illegitimate Lukashenko regime. Persian is represented by an Iranian flag (note that Persian is also spoken in Afghanistan and other places), featuring the tulip-shaped “Allah” emblem, but not the religious writing in the seams. Latin is represented by an anachronistic SPQR flag, rather than e.g. the Vatican (where it is still an official language).

28

I think the flag icon is preferable even for countries like India where there are several major languages. In those cases, the Indian flag (for example) would just be on the list a couple of times instead of just once.

The best viable alternative would be to get rid of any icon whatsoever and just have the list of languages, but that seems comparatively boring and unnecessary IMO.

29

Spend more time language learning and less time getting offended over nothing.

30
  1. Dig out an old thread.
  2. Don’t read.
  3. Right away give advice on how important it is to spend one’s time only on important things.
  4. Feel paradoxically closer to your own time-management standards.
3 Likes
31

Damn! I did the (2). I feel so bad, so so bad. I go binge eating now so I can feel better. :rofl: