You Should Never Use Flags For Language Choice
Flag icons are pretty (like fam-fam-fam icon set). But flag represents a country, not a language. Isn't it obvious? No, it's obviously not! While I surfed the web yesterday I found several websites that use flags for language choice. Here are a few reasons why you'll never want to do that.
1. It can be very confusing
There are many flags in the world that are very similar. And when they are 16x16 they become hardly recognizable. Let's, for example, take a look at the following flags:
 Netherlands |  Luxembourg |  Croatia |
 Slovakia |  Slovenia |  Russia |
Photo by nofrills
Do you see where the problem is? Yes, they are all similar. And some of them are almost identical! And that's not all. It can be even more confusing. Let's take Canada for example. If you use a flag of Canada for language choice, in which language content would be: English or French?
This one argument should be enough to convince you not to use flags. But if not, here are two more.
2. It could insult
Few years ago, one of our clients was showing us a website in order to show us what he would like to have on his own. Suddenly, he pointed to English flag and said "Hmm, I DO speak English, but this is not the flag of my country. I hate when I see this! I might not know all the flags, and then what?" Simple.
3. It could mess up your design
Just imagine a website localized in ten or more languages. Where would you put all these flags? Just imagine what would it look like?
So,what would be the right choice?
Although it is hard to tell what would be the best choice, one thing is certain: language choices should be presented with language names in the languages themselves. This can be done, for example, as a list of text links, or by populating drop down list.
What is your opinion? If you disagree, I'd like to know why!
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(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
potatolicious replied on Tue, 2008/10/28 - 12:47am
While all of your points are valid, I don't think they add up to enough to justify not using flag icons. When choosing language icons, it is generally sufficient to choose a distinctive flag of the most prominent country where the language is spoken (USA for English, for example, even though English is spoken in many other places). Users aren't stupid and know clicking on the American flag means English.
And yes, it can insult the humorless and oversensitive, but IMHO that's a small price to pay for the potential payoffs of using flag icons:
- Substantially improve the workflow in cases where you only need a few languages (~6 or so). The user does not have to go through the cognitively difficult task of using a drop-down (one of the worst UI elements out there in terms of usability, really), and can dive directly into the option they wish.
- Take up significantly less screen real-estate (displaying the textual version of your languages will be far larger), and is particularly useful in mobile applications where a dropdown box is a major usability chore, and hinder workflow.
- From a cognitive ergonomics perspective, the human mind is far more apt locating images in a bunch than it is at locating a single word in a bunch. Consultation of basic psychology literature and studies will tell you that humans scan text sequentially, while groups of aligned images can be processed all at once, greatly reducing confusion, mental strain, and increasing your workflow's friendliness, the user's response accuracy, and time taken to select.
While there are definite drawbacks to using flag icons (they're not perfect for all cases), I don't believe it is wise to ignore their strengths.nihowma replied on Tue, 2008/10/28 - 1:28am
I disagree with Potatolicious.
"Users aren't stupid"
of course not! but we must understand the the abstraction of a political entity versus a language entity is not CLEAN. It encumbers the process of "I want to read this in X" and replaces it with a transaction that says " I am X and we speak Z in my country". While the US of A has English as the majority language it does not really answer the question of "what language do you want?" it asks "what political affiliation do you expect?".
Bilingual speakers will have to choose between English and some other flag. Maybe you have been to a European site, they have all kinds of funny colors and patterns but you aren't from there... but wait you can speak British English kinda, yeah that's what I am, British!!! [while being an English speaking American] You force the user to change their expectation to meet your [the developer's] need, and that's always a bad trade-off.
As for the UI considerations, it's a dual language code... EN-US, EN-UK, etc... from a monolingual perspective [speaking only one language] you don't get much exposure to different languages, so you can't begin to understand how someone who doesn't speak your language understands the speaking of others... most non-englsish speakers can recognize their and other languages, it's fascinating.
From a cognitive association and list reading perspective, yes it has it's place, maybe in a MAP of where you are from then a second level of what language you like to read/speak/etc. given the lingustic prevalence in that country--but this won't work for India where there are over 20 OFFICIAL languages... if the means is to reduce the cognitive load maybe it's best asked: what do you speak? insead of presenting a list of 130 possible combinations with the further trouble of sorting out the legal B.S.
yes. legal... I talk about it too from a localization perspective...
djuggler replied on Tue, 2008/10/28 - 8:44am
dzovan replied on Tue, 2008/10/28 - 3:43pm
@potatolicious: you forgot one fact - semantically, flag represent a country, not a language. @nihowma gave very good explanation. Canada, India, you name it... which flag would you use?
@nihowma: you can see one possible flag usage on my blog, in comments: http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2008/10/27/You-should-never-use-flags-for-language-choice.aspx
@djuggler: I wouldn't choose abbreviations/codes. Not all the people recognize them.
Philippe Lhoste replied on Fri, 2008/11/21 - 1:21pm
There is at least one thing that flags do well: they stand out and tell the user: "Look, we can change the language of the interface"...
But I suppose a well chosen logo beside the drop-down can do something similar.