About cultural/languages communities flags

[Philippe Verdy]

This is just experience of visiting sites commonly using these flags to
represent (inappropriately) languages *visually*. And even if it is not the
best way to represent languages, this is what happens (Unicode cannot
interfer with the freedom of speech and the choice of authors if they
prefer visual icons to plain words).


2015-02-13 16:37 GMT+01:00 Shervin Afshar <shervinafshar at gmail.com>:

>
> On Feb 13, 2015 3:12 AM, "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> > This is completely a non-issue with the Unicode standard itself. There's
> an ample enough space to use various designs that match character
> properties as well as user expectations *without* breaking the character
> identity itself. So even if the US flag is often used for English, in
> Britanic sites they will use the British flag. In the Republic of Ireland
> they'll won't use the Irish flag for the English language (prefered for the
> Irish language itself) and will unlikely use the British flag. In South
> Africa or India to, they won't use their national flag for English
> (multiple official languages there, and English is not even the preferred
> language).
>
> Are these statements about use of flags for language selectors on
> websites, based on some UX study, survey, or commonly accepted guideline,
> or are they just speculations?
>
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