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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good iconic systems you know that identify languages directly?

I don't think such a system does or can exist. e.g. nl-NL is distinct from nl-BE which is distinct from fr-BE. Using a country flag doesn't work if a country uses multiple languages. Languages themselves don't have icons to go with them like countries do, but even if they did it wouldn't distinguish between the same language spoken in different countries, which can matter a lot for how things get localized. nl-NL uses way more words with french roots than nl-BE for example.

What I tend to do is have a dropdown with a country icon and language name localized to that language for each language. My pet peeve is trying to switch a website from a language I don't speak into one I do speak and the dropdown listing "Dutch" as "Néerlandais" or whatever instead of "Nederlands". I don't speak french, why would I know what dutch is called in french?

You're slightly confusing dialects with countries (there can be ones not tied to a single country), but more importantly, this places no hard limit on design, you can have icon variations for dialects as well.

(and yes, language switching menus you can't understand are dumb, especially for more complicated cases where names don't even look similar, but unfortunately common)

As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And even that criterium quickly breaks down at mild scrutiny. And not just because of landlocked countries.

Linguists try to draw some lines in the sand, but in the end the reasons we call Swiss German a dialect and Luxemburgish a language are cultural and political.

> As they say: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy

As opposed to a country, which needs an airline and a beer: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/16/beer-airline/

Politicians are the ones still trying to draw arbitrary lines based on language. Linguists have largely threw in the towel on this quite some time ago.

So if your criterium breaks down, you would agree that you can't map every single language/dialect to a country in a neat fr-BE scheme?

The example given is de-CH and lb-LU - a counterexample for the neat scheme would require separate dialects of the same language within a single country e.g. 近畿方言.

Obviously no, 26² makes 676, and number of languages in the world is estimated to be around 4000 and 8000. Given that 26³ is 17576, you would probably start to have something vast enough with scheme like ab-cd-ef.

I think the language/dialect distinction is not even helpful - all that counts is what people understand.

As a native German speaker, who never learnt Dutch, I can tell you that I understand nl-NL a lot better than de-CH. There is a reason de-CH is subtiteled in German media.

No, I don’t.

I do think it might be conceptually possible and intellectually funny to come with flags that are generated from some pattern that some corpus of languages exhibit. Be it sui generis through some LLM, or relying more on scholar lexical/syntactic categorizations, or even something really more trivial like using a language-code[1] as entry.

On the other hand, with such an approach I’m afraid that chances are low that we can gain any adherence and a large recognition of the resulting flags from their speakers.

To my mind the best approaches as of today where already exposed in this thread: something best effort to propose the most likely user recognizable language and a clearly visible option to open a locale selector. If iconography seems a must have in the UI, showing something like a A/あ icon is rather usual by now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_code

no, and they don't need to. a list is fine, you can include the name of the language (localized), a specifier if there are variants of the language, and even the language name and variant localized in itself. Sure, "Español (República Dominicana) - Spanish (Dominican Republic)" might be a bit long but it's still way easier fitting it into a picker than trying to come up with an icon for it.

No, it's not only not easy, it's impossible to fit into your tray icon

Sure but you don’t fill the tray stack with all country flags either, do you?

You need just one icon to open the locale selector, and possibly an other one giving feedback of which one is currently applied. For the latter using a language code looks like a realistic option:

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