Sightseeing tours near Lisbon in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Japanese

The use of flag icons, particularly national flags, for languages is a common practice. Such icons have long been used on tourist attraction signage, and elsewhere in the tourism space, but have found wider use in website localization where UX limitations have become apparent.[1][2]

Mixed flags

English: US/UK flag icon

Sometimes the flags of international language communities, such as the Flag of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries or the flag of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie can be used, but they are not as widely recognised as national flags.[3] Where more than one country is a major user of a language, a flag divided diagonally may be used, such as the flags of Brazil and Portugal to indicate the Portuguese language; Brazilians may be offended by the use of their former colonial master's flag to symbolise the Portuguese language, as there are far more speakers of it in Brazil (over 200 million) than in Portugal (10 million).[4][5]

Writing systems

Where two written standards exist for a single language, national flags can be used to distinguish between them: for example, the Flag of Taiwan for Traditional Chinese and the Flag of the People's Republic of China for Simplified Chinese.[6]

Flag of Taiwan
Flag of China
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese

Political motivations

Sign in the Republic of Ireland using the Irish flag for both English and Irish

Some Euronet ATMs (automated teller machines) display the Irish flag as a symbol for the English language (usually UK flag or English flag). In the media, this was speculated to be a response to Brexit, with the Republic of Ireland as one of the only two Anglophone nations left in the European Union (another being Malta). Dr. Oetker have been observed doing the same.[7] The Irish flag is more usually used to signify the Irish language.[8]

Criticism

The use of flag icons for languages has been criticized as poor design.[9] The symbolism of a national flag introduces politicization, and often ambiguity.

Belying the nation-state concept, many languages are natively spoken in several countries, and many countries have several major languages. Alternatives include using the native names of languages or their language codes, possibly under a generic symbol of translation such as the Language Icon.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Meloni, Julie C. (May 25, 2012). Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One: STY PHP, MySQL Apache AIO_p5. Sams Publishing. ISBN 9780132603645 – via Google Books.
  2. ↑ Cronin, Blaise (March 23, 2004). Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Information Today, Inc. ISBN 9781573872096 – via Google Books.
  3. ↑ Heritage, Canadian (August 15, 2017). "Flags of La Francophonie". www.canada.ca.
  4. ↑ Swisher, Val (October 13, 2014). Global Content Strategy. XML Press. ISBN 9781492002086 – via Google Books.
  5. ↑ Guilherme, Manuela; Souza, Lynn Mario T. Menezes de (February 6, 2019). Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back. Routledge. ISBN 9781351184632 – via Google Books.
  6. ↑ Graff, Roy; Parulis-Cook, Sienna (July 9, 2019). China, the Future of Travel. Lulu.com. ISBN 9780244800529 – via Google Books.
  7. ↑ Troughton-Smith, Steve (14 April 2019). "English instructions on the back of EU food coming with an Irish flag 🇮🇪 instead of a UK one 🇬🇧 is my new favorite burn 🤣". Twitter.
  8. ↑ McNally, Frank. "English Stew – Frank McNally on a meeting of the anglophone world in Limerick". The Irish Times.
  9. ↑ Watrall, Ethan; Siarto, Jeff (2009). Head First Web Design. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". ISBN 978-0-596-52030-4.
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