Languages are now in the sidebar

[Jar-Ptitsa]

It sounds interesting, but what to do about countries that are officially bilingual, trilingual, etc.? Hovering might be cumbersome for each language, especially if it has a bunch of multilingual countries, i.e.

Canada (English, French)
Belgium (French, Dutch/Flemish)
Luxembourg (French, German, Luxembourgish)
Switzerland (German, French, Italian, Romansch)
Singapore (English, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil)
Republic of Ireland (Irish, English)
Perú (Spanish, Quechua, Aymara)
South Africa (too many to list: 11 languages or so)

I was thinking also, how to deal with those who do not feel that their language is part of the country? The first one that came to mind was Catalan. Would it be the Catalan flag with the 4 red stripes on yellow shield instead of the Spanish flag? And those who speak a mix of 2 versions, like British + Australian English instead of a pure form of either. Would Scottish English speakers who cannot speak Scottish get the Scottish flag instead of the Union Flag?

I have a friend who grew up in the Anglophone world but who has no real native language, according to him, because he speaks a mix of Shanghainese with Mandarin that apparently no one except his immediate family understands, although he can switch to standard Mandarin if necessary.

Not to complicate things, I think that it could be a good idea, but there are some other factors that need to be taken into account.

Yes the flags system is complicated,

Belgium has 3 national languages not 2:

French
Dutch (Flemish)
German
and also some others like Walloon, Picard etc

My native language is Belgian French, therefore I wouldn't want to put the French flag, but with the Belgian one, it wouldn't be possible to know Fr, NL or De.

how about the Swiss people or Chinese or Indian etc?

[CarlyD]

I've seen the flags at another forum, and while I like the look of the flags I have to admit that I don't recognize most of them. And someone with 7 or 8 flags showing under their name--I don't take the time to hover over each flag, I just move on.

I wouldn't mind the flag of Germany for my German, but for my Latin American Spanish I'd at least want the flag of Mexico, not Spain.

[iguanamon]

Flags sound like a lot of fun! Benny's site uses them. For bilingual, trilingual, multilingual countries, people could have the choice to use them or not. Or maybe people can even make up their own. Of course, flags could also be the ultimate political statement, and could create a lot of headaches too.

Just for fun, mine would look like this: Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, São Paulo State (Brazil), Haiti, Ladino- no flag

[Brun Ugle]

Personally, I prefer seeing the names of the languages in the sidebar rather than flags. It's so much quicker to glance at the name than to figure out the flag. Also, would this hovering thing even work with a touch screen? Supposedly, you can hover over the progress bars in people's signatures to show the actual numbers, but I can't make them show on my tablet. More and more people are using tablets and phones to access the net, so new features ought to be compatible.

[aabram]

I understand the problem with flags not representing the languages, but on the other hand it'd look a bit prettier and more cheerful to have little colorful specks there instead just the wall of text.

[basica]

I like the way unilang does it, they also have the flags available to use as emoticons which is really cool too as you can use them to graphically mark something - so with users who do multilingual log posts, they can place them before their texts if they like to easily show what language is being used.

[emk]

I think it would be very cool to have flags for user's countries! And emoticon flags would be awesome. Maybe that's in the Unilang language database plugin that I didn't install?

But personally, I'm not really sure I want the forum's software to use national flags to represent languages, especially in profiles. There's two major problems here:

1. Many languages are spoken in more than one country, and many countries speak more than one language. This leads to awkward compromises: Should Canadian anglophones use a US flag, a British flag, or a Canadian flag? But does this mean that Québécois French speakers only get to use a provincial flag, even though Canada is officially bilingual? And what about Montréal's anglophones? And so on.
2. For some people, it's a very touchy subject! I understand that some software companies have gotten in pretty serious trouble with the government of Taiwan for representing Mandarin with a Chinese flag, for example.

So as a geek, using flags to represent languages seems fundamentally illogical. As a technical administrator, it sounds like one more database that I have to keep up to date. And as a moderator, it sounds like an invitation to get dragged into another horrible 20-page flame war about the status of Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states, which always makes we want to stab my eyes out with a spoon.

So here's my counter-proposal: The next time I install phpBB extensions, I take a look at the Unilang language database extension, and I see if that will get us flag emoticon support. And if somebody wants to find or write an extension which adds flags for users' countries, I'd happily look into installing that.

[iguanamon]

As usual, something seemingly innocent and fun can get complicated in a hurry. Thanks, emk, for reminding us of that.

[Brun Ugle]

I prefer the languages in the sidebar to be listed by name as they are now, for the reasons emk stated, as well as it just being easier. (I find words easier to understand than symbols.) However, flag emoticons would be nice. I always liked when people used flags in their logs to introduce each new language in their post.

[basica]

With regards to people's potential negative reactions, I think it's definitely wise to note what can go wrong - but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will. I've been lurking unilang for quite a while and I don't think I've ever really seen much fuss over the flags and people there tend to be very interested in languages that could cause some sort of stir concerning the flags (i.e. catalan seems to be really popular). As a sort of general comment, I hope we don't let fear rule us from trying out new things - not that I am saying that this is happening, just I think that anything can have a potential downside and I don't want us to let the possibility of that cause us to rule things outright.