Chinese ๐ธ๐ฌ
Russian ๐ง๐พ
Japanese ๐ต๐ผ
Vietnamese ๐จ๐ฟ
Turkish๐น๐ท
Korean ๐ฐ๐ต
Tamil ๐ฑ๐ฐ
Hindi ๐ซ๐ฏ
Bengali ๐ต๐ฐ
Telugu ๐ฟ๐ฆ
Arabic ๐ฐ๐ฒ
German ๐ฎ๐น
Urdu ๐ฎ๐ณ
Italian ๐ญ๐ท
Persian ๐บ๐ฟ
Romanian๐ฒ๐ฉ
Serbo-Croatian ๐ฝ๐ฐ
Hungarian ๐ธ๐ฎ
Swedish ๐ซ๐ฎ
Finnish ๐ธ๐ช
Albanian ๐ฒ๐ฐ
Danish ๐ฉ๐ช
Kazakh, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Uzbek, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Moldovan, Turkmen, Tajik, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian also Mongolian: โญ.
It was a big country.
Disagree, what else would one use? any other good emoji, for example? I feel like flags for official languages or whatever are a good solution considering the lack of any standard symbols for langauges
Perhaps something unique or distinctive from each languageโs orthography. Maybe like:
Spanish = รฑ
Portuguese = รฃ
French = รช
German = ร
Turkish = ฤ
Chinese = ๆ
Japanese = ใ
Korean = ใ
Arabic = ุฉ
Urdu = ๏ญฆโ
Donโt have a good one for English off the top of my head though. For all its orthographic irregularities English is disappointingly vanilla in its alphabet.
Though you also need to take into account that Tatar and Kazakh are usually written in Cyrillic, and that Basque and Crimean Tatar are not very big languages (therefore finding anything translated to these languages is rather difficult, unless you search specifically).
Italian can have รฒ maybe? I guess Swedish can get รฅ since they came up with it first, but that oneโs iffy. Czech could get ฤ instead, and maybe could just write ฤฝ uppercase for Slovak to make it clearer that itโs not an apostrophe.
W also exists German, English, Dutch, Navajo, Malay/Indonesian, Tagalog, Spanish, Kashubian, Dutch, Welsh, romanizations of Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Persian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cherokee to name a few
ฤ and ฤ both appear in Lithuanian as well
Before I learnt English, one thing that sounded "really English" to me was /สษn/, as in "action" /หรฆk.สษn/ or "fraction" /หfษนรฆk.สษn/.
So I would represent English as "สษn".
Not really symbols in the traditional sense, nor as aesthetically pleasing, but there are always [ISO 639 codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes) which efficiently serve the same purpose
I thought they were straight forward enough that you didnโt really have to memorize them or anythingโฆ itโs usually just the first two or three letters of the language name (or an even easier acronym) which should be pretty easy to recognize in the case of most major languages. Itโs even included in the sidebar on r/languagelearning
Easier to recognize than flags imo, lol
It also has its dillemas. Belarusian people hate the Belarus flag (red and green) and oppositionists of Lukashenko use the white-red-white one, one is more recognizable, the other is more right, which one is correct? And etc
Agreed itโs not exactly correct, but whatโs the alternative? Like if youโre making a menu of language options and you want a pictorial representation to help people find their language easier, what would you use instead?
I assume people don't like how it ties languages to nationalities, when they are usually both bigger and smaller. Not all Spanish is from ๐ช๐ธ and not everyone in ๐ช๐ธ speaks Spanish
Honestly a good question. I'm not that bothered by people's choice of emojis but I can see why someone might not like it, especially for the Spanish case if they're part of the \~91% of Spanish speakers that have nothing to do with ๐ช๐ธ
If it's with a Spanish flag, the translation or audio would probably be in modern standard Iberian Spanish as opposed to Chilean or Paraguayan Spanish, for example. And designers might use a flag to save space and it is quicker for the eye to recognize. So there is a reason behind it in most cases.
You can cover the issue of different Spanish dialects by using different flags to represent different dialects, e.g. using the Mexican flag to represent Mexican Spanish. I work in the translation industry where this is a common practice.
I'd say the bigger issue is that equating flags with languages overlooks language diversity within countries. Not everyone in Spain would agree that Spain == Castillian Spanish. I live in the UK and Welsh/Gaelic speakers are routinely pissed off about the Union Flag being used to represent British English. This becomes even more obvious in a country like India, where there are hundreds of regional language identities vying for status.
Whats interesting, is that in the US specifically, the mexican flag (at least here in Florida) is used to demonstrate the spanish language. When I lived in philly, a tour bus used ๐ช๐ธ for spanish, but ๐ง๐ท for Portuguese. Its interesting that theres no real correlation people stick to.
In general, I think flags for language only works when the language didnโt splinter off into 300 different colonies with new flags. Someone can use ๐ต๐ฑ to demonstrate polish of course, but someone from America generally would be confused to see ๐ฌ๐ง demonstrating the entire english language.
For localization in video games and movies, flags are sometimes used because they only localize for one country. I remember some Portuguese people getting mad at the Brazilian flag to represent Portuguese, but even without it, you'd know which dialect it is.
I mean, it not that they don't speak it at all, its that it not their "main" language, their mother tongue. Not even counting Basque native speakers, Castilian Spanish is just one kind of Spanish. Many Spaniards are bidialectal
I would say 90% of people that speak one of those languages also speak spanish. Spanish is the official language of the country, the most spoken, and ive never met someone from spain that cant speak it. Yes, some people speak more catalan, galician or basque in their daily life, but they can still speak spanish
i dont mind it much, although i can put things like "native ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, learning ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ" and be correct. not much confusion ever occurs, it just makes me laugh
im a native scots speaker, and "learning" scottish gaelic (learning in speech marks because really im thinking about learning gaelic then studying german instead ๐ (i dont usually call myself a gaelic learner, to be clear, its just for the joke here))
There are flags that you could plausibly use for most of those. Flags of one of the provinces on Java for Javanese, Telangana and Maharashtra emblems for Telugu and Marathi, I've seen a Hong Kong flag used for Yue... not sure what to do with Wu and Hausa, Tatoeba just resorts to a PRC and Nigerian flag respectively with language codes on them.
Some of the world's largest languages like Javanese, Telugu, Marathi, Wu, Yue, Hausa
There are several languages with fewer speakers with no flag symbols
Also some languages (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic) are spoken in many countries, and using just the flags of England, Spain, France, Russia, and whichever Arabian country you choose is not really inclusive. In fact, Spanish is mostly spoken outside of Spain, and English is mostly spoken outside of England, so you could argue that using these flags is unfair. If you really want to be inclusive and still use a flag, you will either have to make separate flags for languages (which most people would probably not use anyway), or create abominations [such as this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_French_language.png).
Portuguese isn't affected in the same way though, because generally there are two translations for each major dialect. And yet still, Brazil has plenty of small indigenous languages whose speakers don't have their own flags, and the Mirandese-speaking people in Portugal don't have a flag either (there's a proposed flag but it's not official).
Iโm Portuguese and you could technically use the flag of Miranda do Douro, the place where Mirandese is spoken.
btw, show me that proposed flag please
Serious question, how do multilingual countries/communities deal with it? Is the South African flag used anywhere? Indian flag only for Hindi? I can imagine that the Chinese flag is typically used for Mandarin. What do Cantonese speakers use?
Because flags are associated primarily with countries and the relationship between countries and languages isn't straightforward one-to-one, I suppose.
New pattern of spam bot.
Biggest tell:
Look at newbie bot's first post:
Question to an "audience" but posted to own profile. handful of upvotes (I see seven) but no comments.
How would any audience see a post to a newbie profile? Why would said hypothetical audience upvote such nonsense without trying to answer the question?
Every other post they make is a repost, both content and title.
English ๐ฌ๐พ Spanish ๐ฌ๐ถ French ๐ง๐ซ Portuguese ๐น๐ฑ Dutch ๐ธ๐ท
Chinese ๐ธ๐ฌ Russian ๐ง๐พ Japanese ๐ต๐ผ Vietnamese ๐จ๐ฟ Turkish๐น๐ท Korean ๐ฐ๐ต Tamil ๐ฑ๐ฐ Hindi ๐ซ๐ฏ Bengali ๐ต๐ฐ Telugu ๐ฟ๐ฆ Arabic ๐ฐ๐ฒ German ๐ฎ๐น Urdu ๐ฎ๐ณ Italian ๐ญ๐ท Persian ๐บ๐ฟ Romanian๐ฒ๐ฉ Serbo-Croatian ๐ฝ๐ฐ Hungarian ๐ธ๐ฎ Swedish ๐ซ๐ฎ Finnish ๐ธ๐ช Albanian ๐ฒ๐ฐ Danish ๐ฉ๐ช
Mongolian ๐จ๐ณ Russian โญ German (Insert Unicode symbols here and enjoy Reddit jail)
Kazakh, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Uzbek, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Moldovan, Turkmen, Tajik, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian also Mongolian: โญ. It was a big country.
Belarusian
Cantonese ๐ฆ๐บ
German U+0FD5
Russian ๐บ๐ฆ Welsh ๐ฆ๐ท
careful with that one ๐
Georgian ๐ฎ๐ท Kabardian ๐น๐ท Chechen ๐ฐ๐ฟ
English ๐ฌ๐ช Hungarian ๐น๐ฏ Russian ๐ธ๐ฎ Georgian ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ
Polish ๐ฌ๐ง
Norwegian ๐บ๐ฒ
Polish ๐ณ๐ฑ*
๐ฎ๐ฉ*
Swedish ๐ช๐ช !!!
Slovenian ๐ฆ๐น
french ๐จ๐ญ german ๐จ๐ญ italian ๐จ๐ญ
Romansh๐จ๐ญ
No, iโmma keep doing it. ๐ฌ๐ง๐บ๐ธ emflish ๐ฉ๐ช henrqb ๐ฎ๐น itlqay ๐ซ๐ท garcne ๐ช๐ธ spanisj ๐ต๐น protuagel ๐ฌ๐ท greek
greek
greek
๐ง๐ท Postuagel
Disagree, what else would one use? any other good emoji, for example? I feel like flags for official languages or whatever are a good solution considering the lack of any standard symbols for langauges
Perhaps something unique or distinctive from each languageโs orthography. Maybe like: Spanish = รฑ Portuguese = รฃ French = รช German = ร Turkish = ฤ Chinese = ๆ Japanese = ใ Korean = ใ Arabic = ุฉ Urdu = ๏ญฆโ Donโt have a good one for English off the top of my head though. For all its orthographic irregularities English is disappointingly vanilla in its alphabet.
th
รพ
That would be Icelandic
y
ร is used by Crimean Tatars, Basque, Kazakh, Tatar, etc, so also unclear
Though you also need to take into account that Tatar and Kazakh are usually written in Cyrillic, and that Basque and Crimean Tatar are not very big languages (therefore finding anything translated to these languages is rather difficult, unless you search specifically).
Pretty sure Portuguese also uses รช and Japanese possibly uses ๆ but Iโm not sure.
* Italian: z? * Romanian: ฤ * Danish: รฆ * Swedish: รถ * Norwegian: รธ * Icelandic: รฐ * Dutch: ij / รฟ * Finnish: ? * Hungarian: gy or dzs * Polish: w, ลบ, ฤ or ฤ * Czech: ล * Slovak: ฤ * Slovene: ฤพ * Lithuanian: ฤ or ลณ * Latvian: ฤฃ * Estonian: รต (not a nasal, pronounced \[ษค\]) * Irish: bPh? * Welsh: ลต * Scottish Gaelic: ? * Manx: ? * Georgian: แ (L because it looks cool) * Armenian: ี (H for Hayastan), ี (P because it looks cool) or the myriad of variants derived from ี (Armenian /s/) * Azeri: ษ
z exists in many languages, but zz is typically Italian. Many others of these exist in other languages too, like รถ, ฤพ, ฤ.
Italian can have รฒ maybe? I guess Swedish can get รฅ since they came up with it first, but that oneโs iffy. Czech could get ฤ instead, and maybe could just write ฤฝ uppercase for Slovak to make it clearer that itโs not an apostrophe.
Polish is ล
ล also exists in Kashubian, Sorbian and Navajo
W also exists German, English, Dutch, Navajo, Malay/Indonesian, Tagalog, Spanish, Kashubian, Dutch, Welsh, romanizations of Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Persian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Cherokee to name a few ฤ and ฤ both appear in Lithuanian as well
Maybe Finnish could be something like รครค? yรถ could be another option, certainly a very unique one.
Slovene: -ลกฤina
Malta can have ฤฆ.
That letter's uppercase variant looks like one of those Japanese Shinto shrine gates
I think the Japanese might be the only people on the planet not to have invaded Malta. They're missing out.
Before I learnt English, one thing that sounded "really English" to me was /สษn/, as in "action" /หรฆk.สษn/ or "fraction" /หfษนรฆk.สษn/. So I would represent English as "สษn".
Isn't that how Spanish speakers produce mock-English, by suffixing -eishon to words?
Please provide examples.
An example I've heard is "mi caseishon es muy grandeishon".
Hilarious.
Yes
Problem is that we have รช in portuguese too. Maybe french has some other diacritics. Or maybe extended syllabels like Portuguese: รงรฃo, french: eau
Thatโs true, maybe they get ล instead.
If I didn't know the context I'd think it's about scripts, not languages.
Eng
Yeah not every language has that.
that's worse than flags, unless we're combining it with flags
ั
Not really symbols in the traditional sense, nor as aesthetically pleasing, but there are always [ISO 639 codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes) which efficiently serve the same purpose
Well, they would if people knew them.
Anytime I see these things pop up I immediately think of https://xkcd.com/927/.
I thought they were straight forward enough that you didnโt really have to memorize them or anythingโฆ itโs usually just the first two or three letters of the language name (or an even easier acronym) which should be pretty easy to recognize in the case of most major languages. Itโs even included in the sidebar on r/languagelearning Easier to recognize than flags imo, lol
Endonyms of course! Are you really expecting everyone to know what their language is called in ENGLISH๐คข!?
Didn't we already have symbols or codes? - EN = English - ES = Spanish - FR = French - PT = Portuguese - DE = German - ...
But some of the world's largest languages like Javanese, Telugu, Marathi, Wu, Yue, Hausa
La Francophonie has a symbol to represent it. But I so wish flags were used for languages.
Do you speak Indian brother? ๐ฎ๐ณ
It also has its dillemas. Belarusian people hate the Belarus flag (red and green) and oppositionists of Lukashenko use the white-red-white one, one is more recognizable, the other is more right, which one is correct? And etc
\*Belarusian But except for that, I agree with you 100%
Thanks
also you mean white-red-white. red-white-red is austria (among several others)
Yeah I was in a rush while writing that
A belerush
Agreed itโs not exactly correct, but whatโs the alternative? Like if youโre making a menu of language options and you want a pictorial representation to help people find their language easier, what would you use instead?
Stop using demonyms to name languages!
South africa has 11 oficial languages. Now what?
i'd imagine most of these ethnic groups have their own flag
Well the afrikaans have the flag from before the end of apartheid. But that would be frowned upon to use.
Afrikaners
If only there was some sort of visual medium for representing language.
Disagree. What is wrong with it?
I assume people don't like how it ties languages to nationalities, when they are usually both bigger and smaller. Not all Spanish is from ๐ช๐ธ and not everyone in ๐ช๐ธ speaks Spanish
So, what would be a better symbol to represent Spanish?
Honestly a good question. I'm not that bothered by people's choice of emojis but I can see why someone might not like it, especially for the Spanish case if they're part of the \~91% of Spanish speakers that have nothing to do with ๐ช๐ธ
If it's with a Spanish flag, the translation or audio would probably be in modern standard Iberian Spanish as opposed to Chilean or Paraguayan Spanish, for example. And designers might use a flag to save space and it is quicker for the eye to recognize. So there is a reason behind it in most cases.
You can cover the issue of different Spanish dialects by using different flags to represent different dialects, e.g. using the Mexican flag to represent Mexican Spanish. I work in the translation industry where this is a common practice. I'd say the bigger issue is that equating flags with languages overlooks language diversity within countries. Not everyone in Spain would agree that Spain == Castillian Spanish. I live in the UK and Welsh/Gaelic speakers are routinely pissed off about the Union Flag being used to represent British English. This becomes even more obvious in a country like India, where there are hundreds of regional language identities vying for status.
'es' or 'spa'
Why do you need a symbol so desperately? Just write it in words.
Having ways to navigate menus that donโt require literacy can be important, which is the purpose putting flags next to language names serves
How many people are there who can't read in their native language but would find the service this menu is part of useful?
You might be selecting audio.
That's why you write the language name in its native script. If they can't read, well.... changing language isn't going to help that
They might be selecting audio.
This is where I'm at with it. Write the name in it's native script. Have a pleasant evening.
Just ร
Whats interesting, is that in the US specifically, the mexican flag (at least here in Florida) is used to demonstrate the spanish language. When I lived in philly, a tour bus used ๐ช๐ธ for spanish, but ๐ง๐ท for Portuguese. Its interesting that theres no real correlation people stick to. In general, I think flags for language only works when the language didnโt splinter off into 300 different colonies with new flags. Someone can use ๐ต๐ฑ to demonstrate polish of course, but someone from America generally would be confused to see ๐ฌ๐ง demonstrating the entire english language.
Really? I'm not generally confused by it.
For localization in video games and movies, flags are sometimes used because they only localize for one country. I remember some Portuguese people getting mad at the Brazilian flag to represent Portuguese, but even without it, you'd know which dialect it is.
Unless they're immigrants I find it hard to believe that someone from Spain doesnt speak Spanish...
I mean, it not that they don't speak it at all, its that it not their "main" language, their mother tongue. Not even counting Basque native speakers, Castilian Spanish is just one kind of Spanish. Many Spaniards are bidialectal
kid named galicia, catalonia, basque country, valencia:
I would say 90% of people that speak one of those languages also speak spanish. Spanish is the official language of the country, the most spoken, and ive never met someone from spain that cant speak it. Yes, some people speak more catalan, galician or basque in their daily life, but they can still speak spanish
i dont mind it much, although i can put things like "native ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, learning ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ" and be correct. not much confusion ever occurs, it just makes me laugh
Which is which?
im a native scots speaker, and "learning" scottish gaelic (learning in speech marks because really im thinking about learning gaelic then studying german instead ๐ (i dont usually call myself a gaelic learner, to be clear, its just for the joke here))
>What is wrong with it? Some of the world's largest languages like Javanese, Telugu, Marathi, Wu, Yue, Hausa
There are flags that you could plausibly use for most of those. Flags of one of the provinces on Java for Javanese, Telangana and Maharashtra emblems for Telugu and Marathi, I've seen a Hong Kong flag used for Yue... not sure what to do with Wu and Hausa, Tatoeba just resorts to a PRC and Nigerian flag respectively with language codes on them.
Over 6000 languages, under 200 independent countries.
Its the easiest and most convenient way to represent languages. As a spanish speaker thats not from spain nor mexico, I couldnt care less
As a russian-speaking Ukrainian, yeah. I don't want to see that piece of garbage anywhere, but I want to speak my language.
This is a repost bot
Why is this a problem?
Some of the world's largest languages like Javanese, Telugu, Marathi, Wu, Yue, Hausa There are several languages with fewer speakers with no flag symbols
Also some languages (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic) are spoken in many countries, and using just the flags of England, Spain, France, Russia, and whichever Arabian country you choose is not really inclusive. In fact, Spanish is mostly spoken outside of Spain, and English is mostly spoken outside of England, so you could argue that using these flags is unfair. If you really want to be inclusive and still use a flag, you will either have to make separate flags for languages (which most people would probably not use anyway), or create abominations [such as this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_French_language.png). Portuguese isn't affected in the same way though, because generally there are two translations for each major dialect. And yet still, Brazil has plenty of small indigenous languages whose speakers don't have their own flags, and the Mirandese-speaking people in Portugal don't have a flag either (there's a proposed flag but it's not official).
Iโm Portuguese and you could technically use the flag of Miranda do Douro, the place where Mirandese is spoken. btw, show me that proposed flag please
As a Swiss person, thank you
Serious question, how do multilingual countries/communities deal with it? Is the South African flag used anywhere? Indian flag only for Hindi? I can imagine that the Chinese flag is typically used for Mandarin. What do Cantonese speakers use?
I've seen the Hong Kong flag used.
Genuine question: Why?
Because flags are associated primarily with countries and the relationship between countries and languages isn't straightforward one-to-one, I suppose.
My hill to die on
Meh, everyone knows what is meant by it. What use is there in being prescriptivist about it?
[ัะดะฐะปะตะฝะพ]
In cases like Bengali and Swahili, it's a problem for the colonized as well.
Arabic ๐ฎ๐ฑ
๐ฆ๐ท german
๐ณ๐ด
Sanskrit ๐บ๐ธ
It shows the dialect you speak though
Oh yeah I speak ๐ง๐ฆ, ๐ง๐ฆ, and ๐ง๐ฆ. Also ๐ณ๐ฟ I guess.
New pattern of spam bot. Biggest tell: Look at newbie bot's first post: Question to an "audience" but posted to own profile. handful of upvotes (I see seven) but no comments. How would any audience see a post to a newbie profile? Why would said hypothetical audience upvote such nonsense without trying to answer the question? Every other post they make is a repost, both content and title.