Always show the name of a language in its native spelling and scriptĭesigners should always make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for, and the language selector is no exception.It can’t be assumed that a country name, flag, or other icon can convey to users which language will be presented. Always write out the names of languages.Plus, there are some great methods to employ flags as a design element without compromising their inherent meaning or the usability of a website. There are established best practices for designing language selectors, and plenty of websites that do this well. Designers can’t be sure that users will even recognize the flag selected to fill in for the desired language, and could exit the site unaware that what they were looking for lay right in front of them. The danger of mistaking one flag for another in a design is one issue, but there is also the user’s perspective to consider. Clearly, the Emirates’ flag was mistaken for Germany’s. While there’s no doubt that there are German speakers living in the UAE, Arabic is the official national language and the number of German speakers does not represent a reasonably significant portion of the population. On Revolve Clothing’s website, the flag of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is used to represent the German language. What about making sure that a designer chooses the correct flag for the country? We don’t all know every country’s flag, and introducing this element can backfire when coupled with simple human error. Take a look at a linguistic map of most countries and it becomes clear that a single flag cannot accurately reflect the tapestry of languages found there. These concepts don’t apply just to India, of course. How can the Indian flag accurately convey to a user which language will appear? If the site presents several Indian languages, should the designer simply insert the flag of India multiple times? Depending on how many languages are represented for a country, users could be faced with a long list of their country’s flag and no idea which one applies to them. Admittedly, that would be a difficult choice to make, as India is home to 448 distinct living languages.Īn extremely generalized map of language regions in India. Though the Indian government has selected Hindi (written in Devangari script) and English as the two languages used for official purposes, the Indian constitution does not designate a national language. India is a perfect example of language diversity. On the other side of the coin, a single country can’t be confined to a lone official language. If a designer chooses to use the Brazilian flag to represent Portuguese, like Duolingo does (shown above), how will Lusophone users from other countries react? By choosing the flag of one country to represent a globally spoken language, designers risk confusing – or even offending – a significant portion of their target audience. The Brazilian flag stands in for Portuguese. Which country’s flag should serve as a representative for this group?įurthermore, while The Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement seeks to eliminate many of the spelling differences between official variations of Portuguese, these new spellings remain controversial for many native Portuguese speakers and will likely take many years to be embraced by the populations they affect most – particularly within the cultural vernacular, which is what a company’s translation or localization efforts may want to target.įlags representing languages on the language learning site,. It also has cultural presence (in both traditional and creole variants) in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the ABC islands in the Caribbean, and the Indonesian island of Flores. Portuguese is an official language in Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé & Príncipe, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. Languages are blind to borders, and because of our traveling tendencies we see the same language in use in disparate places all over the map. Wherever we go, we take our mother tongues with us. Throughout history, we’ve been crossing borders, venturing into the unknown, and sometimes settling down in lands that aren’t our own. Humans have always been curious about what lies beyond. Flags were never designed to depict languages, and they do a very poor job of it when leveraged in this way.ĭon’t do this: a prime example of the flag language selector While flags are tempting to designers for a number of reasons – they’re colorful, iconic, and space-efficient – it’s a trap. One of the most prevalent mistakes made by designers of international websites is the use of country flags to represent different languages within a site’s language selector.
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