Thursday, November 15, 2007

Flags for languages

I got into a discussion about what flag should be shown for a particular language. There were two groups of people one side was in favour of a historical faction and the other was in favour of another historical faction. The argument was quite heated. At some stage I asked what the flag for English should be ...

Languages are spoken on both sides of a border. Languages are spoken by people who do not recognise countries or flags. Languages are separate from nationhood. Consequently it is in my honest opinion wrong to associate languages with flags. There are no obvious symbols for languages and for many languages they would share the same flag. OmegaWiki is not likely to ever associate a language with a flag.

Thanks,
GerardM

6 comments:

Minh Nguyễn said...

I’m working on adapting the English Wiktionary’s context template for the Vietnamese version, and the template currently provides flags when referring to certain dialects.

However, I’m doing this to make it easier to spot definitions that you’d want to use, or one’s in other dialects that you’d want to avoid. I’m only planning to display flags where we already display the name of a country. So definitions currently marked "Từ Mỹ, nghĩa Mỹ" (U.S. word, U.S. meaning) will instead be marked with "[U.S. flag] Mỹ". I’ve yet to decide whether to include the flag for regions within the country, such as "Miền nam Hoa Kỳ" (Southern United States).

I noticed several Wiktionaries currently represent languages with flags (example), and I find this highly problematic. English is one example, but displaying flags for languages like Macedonian and Chinese could easily get people all riled up.

Dialects for many languages, such as Vietnamese, can’t be divided by country at all. But with some languages, like English and Spanish, there seem to be much clearer distinctions across national boundaries.

As it happens, Tiêu bản:@Anh (UK English) features the flag of England, to distinguish it from Tiêu bản:@Scotland.

GerardM said...

You describe that you are using flags. Like all others who use flags, you do it to make things "easier".

You however do not argue against the point that I made. The point is that you should not combine languages with flags.
Thanks,
GerardM

Minh Nguyễn said...

Exactly. I completely agree that it’s inappropriate to associate flags with languages. I just wanted to point out that the same isn’t necessarily true with dialects.

GerardM said...

I disagree that it is different for dialects. The issue is that it is a widely held truism that a language is a dialect with an army. It is for this reason that I am more comfortable in talking about linguistic entities.

In your original post you indicated that it does not work really well (southern US). All the more reason not to use flags. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Minh Nguyễn said...

I didn’t think cases like “Southern United States” would be a big deal, because just a few definitions there even have that label. Most of the labels are very broad, and in fact “Từ Mỹ, nghĩa Mỹ” is the most common of them. If the definition already says “U.S.”, it doesn’t change the meaning at all to add the U.S. flag to it. I guess it would help to clarify that these labels and definitions were imported from a well-known dictionary, so it’s not as if we had any say.

Perhaps “American English” is a very large group of dialects, rather than just one. English-language dictionaries by convention mark definitions by country, as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s use of “U.S.” I should note that I’m planning to primarily use flags for English entries in the Vietnamese Wiktionary, since I’m familiar with the dialect distinctions that dictionaries like the OED use.

If the wiki’s users find flags for this limited purpose distracting or incorrect, I’ll relegate them to an option that you can activate with a user stylesheet. I personally find them helpful, though I can defintely understand why others would have objections to them.

Pen Ultimate said...

At kamusiproject.org, we dealt with this issue by using animated gifs. The English gif rotates the flags of the US, UK, and Australia. The Swahili gif rotates the flags of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.

Obviously the flags=languages equation is an oversimplification. After all, English is an official language in all three of the "Swahili" countries, and Swahili is a distinctly minority language in Uganda. However, given the context of the particular website, the flags serve as a useful shorthand that communicates important navigation information quickly. As long as flags are used sensitively, they are often the fastest way to take advantage of the graphic capabilities of the Web.

On the other hand, it pays to be careful. Few English speakers would get outraged if a site chose a US flag instead of a UK flag for "English" (even though Spanish has a strong presence in the US). But I would stay far away from the issue when dealing with historical or contemporary border disputes - if a language is spoken in both Ethiopia and Eritrea, for example, perhaps a map of the Horn of Africa would solve the problem of graphic representation in such a case?