Hi,

flags do not fit for all languages: e.g. german flag, this excludes Austria and Swiss. But take the Swiss flag does this mean german, french or italian? Italian flag does this mean italian? But in the north of italy is a german speaking part ....

So you see, flags seem to be a good choice but they are difficult in some circumstances.

Better is ISO 639 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639

Best Thomas

Comments

blinkingtwelve’s picture

blinkingtwelve commented
Title: flags are missleading » flags are misleading
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

I see. You have a valid point.

First of all, we have to use whatever it is that Google uses (seems to be ISO 639-1). Having a custom mapping would lead to confusion.

Second, as for the symbol images with which to represent those languages, I find it hard to come up with symbols other than flags. Do you know of any?

There is no 1:1 mapping between countries and languages. But in practice, I foresee little difficulties. Most people will expect Italian when they click the Italian flag, and will go looking for this flag when they want to see Italian.

I'm closing this with a 'by design' status, but you are very welcome to reopen it if you can point me to alternate (graphical) symbols than flags.

blinkingtwelve’s picture

blinkingtwelve commented

Risk of confusion has decreased significantly with the introduction of title attributes for the links, see #514602: Show alt/title attributes when hovering over flags.