Neutral (non-national) symbols for languages

["W. Martin Borgert" <debacle@debian.org>]

Hi,

in GUIs, web pages and documentation, national flags are
normally used to indicate a language. Somehow this feels not
"correct" to me, because it gives both "false positives" and
"false negatives". E.g. for German we use the black-red-gold of
the German flag. But German is also spoken in Austria and some
other countries. OTOH, German is not the only language in
Germany, as we have also minority languages. What alternatives
exist, if one wants to have a graphical language indication?

Cheers