As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid.
Not to mention for all those languages that are not the majority language in any country.
As an Australian, I somehow manage not to be entirely baffled by a US/UK flag icon in a language screen.
> Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words.
The purpose of a language selection screen is not to stroke your ego?
As an australian, when was the last time the Australian flag was the incorrect choice for you? I'm going to guess never.
As an Irish person I can't help feeling a frisson of satisfaction.
But as a developer, this is just asking for confusion, especially since the Irish flag is already confusing enough.
I mean, we could have a beautiful white harp on a green background representing Irish culture. The Welsh got a dragon...
But no, it's a political statement from 120 years ago represented in three boring vertical stripes, just like everyone else's flag. It's identical (ok, mirrored) to the Ivory cost flag. It's the same three colors as the India flag, rotated 90 degrees, which itself is very similar to the Niger flag. And if you squint, or just don't know your flags well, it could easily be the Italian flag. It's a terrible choice to represent a language.
The colour-based representation on their flag is similar to ours too, but with the colours reversed.
I did not know that. Always assumed there was a standard aspect ratio for flags.
However, this is another reason why flags aren't a good choice for languages. It works for some of the main languages - German, French, etc. where there's a clear one to one link between originating country's flag and language.
It's less clear for English - the UK flag, the US flag, the Irish flag and apparently even the Canadian flag gets used.
It's basically impossible to choose a flag for minority languages, and many countries have multiple official and widely spoken unofficial languages. What flag should represent Balinese, for example?
I don't have a better solution, and if your site is translated to just a couple of languages it's fine. But I guess as machine translation gets closer to perfect and very cheap, it'll become more common to have lots of translations.
obviously the British flag is for the least controversial option, Ulster Scots.
