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0 pointsesperent1y ago0 comments

English is an official language of Ireland, and by far the most wildly spoken. Gaeilge is also an official language but <4% of Irish people use it as their main language.

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.

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philwelch1y ago

If somebody said to me, “I speak American”, I would infer that they meant the American dialect of the English language. If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic. Similarly, if I saw a Welsh flag on a language selection UI, I would assume that it represented the Welsh Brythonic language even though most Welsh people speak English.

Unicode makes this hard (though it does provide the Welsh flag) but in principle you could solve this for some minority languages. For instance if you wanted to support Catalan, just use the flag of Catalonia, since they have one. You don’t need to have a country to have a flag, and you don’t need to have a country for your flag to become part of Unicode. Unicode has the transgender flag for instance. For Balinese maybe I would just use the flag of Bali.

esperentOP1y ago

> If they said “I speak Irish”, I would infer that they meant Irish Gaelic

But if someone said "I'm from Ireland", you should assume they speak English as their main language. Even if they say "I speak Irish", there's a high chance they're not fully fluent, it's an identity thing for many Irish people.

In any case, it's probably best not to read too much in to this. The whole point is that using flags to represent languages risks getting caught up in exactly this kind of minutiae.

The text EN is unique for English and removes all for it. Put a flag next to the text if you like.

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