The problem with flags representing languages...

Dennis   Thu May 07, 2009 1:49 pm GMT
I've come across the following on another forum:

"I grew up in an English-speaking country and can look across our end of the lake and see another English-speaking country. Together our two countries contain two-thirds of the native English speakers in the world. Neither country is under the British flag.

The first time I went to Europe, I stood in front of a telephone at Frankfurt airport and read the instructions that were under the little German flag. I thought the text under the little British flag was about how to phone to the UK, and I wasn't phoning there. There were no instructions under a US flag, so I figured the information I needed must be under the German flag. It took me a few days to realize that the flags were supposed to symbolize languages, because I'd never seen that before."

In my opinion, it is pretty obvious that it is a bad idea to use flags to symbolize languages. But it's very common...
Would you agree? Are you also annoyed by flags that represent languages, like the flag of Spain for Spanish..?

There are several articles on the topic:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

http://www.btitze.net/flags_vs_languages.html

http://css.dzone.com/news/you-should-never-use-flags-for
Barack   Thu May 07, 2009 1:57 pm GMT
If you're American, and obviously you are, then you should really know where does your mother tongue come from. Definitely not from the US.

In my opinion, most of the Europeans know by heart all the European flags, so I don't see the problem.
By the way, it's not very difficult to assume that Spanish flag represents Spanish language, British flag-English and so on...
Guest   Thu May 07, 2009 2:01 pm GMT
Las instrucciones multilingüe de productos suelen editarse en Europa, ya que hay una diversidad grande de lenguas, por tanto tiene sentido que se usen las banderas de los países europeos donde se hablan esos idiomas, o que pretendes si no, que pongan la bandera mejicana en una cabina telefónica de parís donde se explica en español cómo hacer una llamada telefónica?.


" It took me a few days to realize that the flags were supposed to symbolize languages, "

You are a retarded yankee.
Dennis   Thu May 07, 2009 2:09 pm GMT
Barack, Guest, if you had read my post carefully, you would know that it was a comment I found on another forum.
(http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic6369.html)
Insulting me is really unacceptable. I was not the person standing at the telephone trying to understand what the flags mean.

My point is that flags can be very annoying, for example if you live in Canada or in Mexico - in this case you wouldn't associate the British and the Spanish flag with your native language, would you?
Barack   Thu May 07, 2009 2:12 pm GMT
In Canada they are definitely not using the Canadian flag to represent any language. I suppose they use the French flag for French.
Anyway, this is Europe and we do it this way. Both Americas should invent their own way.
Sorry if I offended you.
Guest   Thu May 07, 2009 2:14 pm GMT
My point is that flags can be very annoying, for example if you live in Canada or in Mexico - in this case you wouldn't associate the British and the Spanish flag with your native language, would you?


Why not? Canada's head of State is the Queen Elizabeth, so they are perfectly aware of what the Union Jack means. Anyways the article is about representing languages with Europeans countries' flags in Europe, not in America, so it makes perfect sense.
blepman   Thu May 07, 2009 2:39 pm GMT
I dont think that this is actually much of a problem, people can usually recognise their own language if its written right in front of their eyes without any sort of identifying label (btw, this is english).
The only real problem I can see is some issues of political correctness, although I dont think the countries' flags are randomly chosen, but rather that they pick the country of the language's origin. It would, however, be interesting to see what else people could think of to represent a language, though now that I say that, I realise that we're going to have a bunch of idiots here writing prejudiced s##t.

Examples:

No creo que esto sea un problema muy grave, la gente normalmente puede reconocer su idioma si está escrito delante de sus ojos, sin ningún tipo de etiqueta identificativa (por cierto, éste es español)
El único problema real que puedo ver…

Não acredito que isso seja um problema muito grave, a gente normalmente pode reconhecer o seu idioma se está escrito em frente dos seus olhos, sem nenhum tipo de etiqueta identificativa (este é português)
O único problema real que posso ver…
(disculpe, o meu português é ruim)
Dennis   Thu May 07, 2009 4:09 pm GMT
A lot of people from Europe will probably not consider it a problem, because within Europe, flags directly correspond to languages.

But what about the following:
- A person from the UK visiting a global website where English is represented by the flag of the United States -> I'm very certain that this is really jarring...

Same thing for a Portuguese if his language is represented by a Brazilian flag. (which is pretty common!)

- A person from Brazil visiting a global website and the Portuguese language is represented by a flag of Portugal, even though more than 80% of Portuguese speakers worldwide are NOT from Portugual.

- What about a flag to symbolize Arabic?
What about Chinese...? How do you distinguish Hindi and Urdu...?

I think these example should make my point very clear.
European   Thu May 07, 2009 6:56 pm GMT
This is only a problem for arrogant americans, who only know their own flag, everyone else knows where the languages come from, so that a British flag means English and not Chinese or Hiri Motu.

And how else would you represent a language?

American English = a picture of a fat person eating a hamburger?

Or what?
another European   Thu May 07, 2009 7:02 pm GMT
<<And how else would you represent a language? >>

A flag with a fat fag in a flat.
Xie   Thu May 07, 2009 7:03 pm GMT
I don't have to say about conflicting national flags on both sides of the Taiwan straits. Strictly speaking, modern Chinese didn't start in 1949, but some time around the foundation of the ROC, now ruling just over Taiwan. But who cares, no business would want to have their produces being rejected, so now the PRC flag is prevailing...

And yes, I think your topic has some truth. A LOT of countries we know are never represented at all in such a way. The simplest way, as what people really do, is just to list out all the names of languages in their native equivalent. English, Deutsch, Français, 中文... I think only ways like such are fair.
logic   Thu May 07, 2009 8:13 pm GMT
It's just shorthand for writing the name of the language, and more colourful.

English = English flag
Spanish = Spanish flag
German = German flag

If you disagree with the language having the flag of its namesake country, then we should change the name of the language too, because that refers to the namesake country also. What can we call English instead?
blepman   Thu May 07, 2009 8:37 pm GMT
Actually, in spain there is a big push to call "spanish" by its more politically correct (and I guess more accurate) name "castellano", because of the presence of many other languages within the country of spain, such as basque, catalan, and galician. So it's not as though the language names aren't undisputed as well.
also, technically it is the British flag (of the entire UK) that is used to represent english, not the english flag, which is actually different.
Guest   Thu May 07, 2009 10:31 pm GMT
Of course it's not a good idea to use flags for languages!

but this is nothing new. It's just a fact that flags represent countries and not languages. A British flag means "Great Britain", an American flag means "United States", a Portuguese flag means "Portugal".

And there is an easy solution without flags: just use the names of the languages! It's pretty simple and obvious. All of the big websites do that. Using flags is totally old-fashioned!

Can anyone of you show me a large influential website that uses flags for languages instead of language names?
tonterías   Thu May 07, 2009 10:32 pm GMT
Over at Unilang, the Welsh flag represents the Welsh language, while the Scottish flag represents both Scots *and* Scottish-Gaelic (!) Since both the Welsh and the Scottish are also British citizens, having the British flag representing the English language only seems rather insensitive. Why not have the English flag represent English? Or will that confuse people thinking it represented Genoese?

What language does the Indian flag represent? Hindi? What flag represents Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, etc? The Indian flag as well? What does the Philippine flag represent? What if I want to find more information on Cebuano or Manobo and all I have are flag representations to rely on. Do I find these languages under the Philippine flag as well?