Given that drupal.org supports two (2) English languages,

  • en (the default), and
  • en-gb

...it would make more sense to have a UK flag represent en-gb instead of representing en (which it does now). Then we could have an unambiguously English-speaking country's flag representing en. I'll suggest the United States, but other ones would work too. (Although I'm Canadian, I wouldn't suggest Canada because we have French as well. The Canadian flag could represent either en-ca or fr-ca, which would be confusing.)

A good idea for a patch would be to move en.png to en-gb.png, and then overwrite en.png with a US flag. I've actually got two of these (US & UK) that are the same dimensions, 16x11, but the project page states that we'd like a height of 12 pixels, not 11. So I thought I'd better wait before uploading a patch with these.

Thoughts?

Comments

finn lewis’s picture

finn lewis
Location Oxford
commented

Language and flag do not necessarily go hand in hand.
If en-gb means "English of Great Britain", then the countries involved are Wales, Scotland and England (and Northern Ireland?), which all have different flags.
I agree that we should avoid ambiguity though, and most people recognise the Union Jack as associated with the English language.
So I'm probably not helping here, just voicing some additional thoughts.

colan’s picture

colan
he/him
Primary language English
Location Toronto 🇨🇦
commented

Good point. It's an old post, but there are more thoughts on that over at #301475: Going for a walk in a minefield?.

geek-merlin’s picture

geek-merlin
Primary language German
Location Freiburg, Germany
commented
Related issues: +#2251203: Language icon fallback foo-bar => foo

The basic semantic problem of this module will persist. Teher are reasons not to use it.

In the meantime this may be helped by #2251203: Language icon fallback foo-bar => foo

Freso’s picture

Freso commented
Category: Bug report » Task
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

The US is also not unambiguously English: there's no country-wide official language and three states have two "official" languages (Hawaiian, Spanish, and French), and then there are all the languages spoken by the Native Americans... granted, most Americans speak English, but so do most British people (Scots, Welsh, English, and Northern Irish alike). People are able to modify the flags they wish to use for their languages as they see fit. (I've used the English flag for English on my own sites, for example, which would probably be too obscure for most people as default.)

Anyway, the proposed change in this issue is a dead end with regards to fixing the deeper issues with the module and the idea behind it, though I am not averse to making an en-GB flag and perhaps a US/UK 50-50 flag for "en"... though that should probably then be a US/UK/SA/... flag... Nah. I think there's no good resolution for this, unfortunately. :/