Re: Neutral (non-national) symbols for languages
"W. Martin Borgert" <debacle@debian.org> writes:
> 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?
You are really not the first one to think about this.
There is one resource I've used when thinking about this, and here is a
short quote from it[1] to give you an answer:
"There is a perfect symbol for any language which you can use on the
Web: the name of the language in the language itself, e.g. English (or
British English or US English, if needed), svenska, suomi, Deutsch,
français. (Be careful with the grammatically correct use of upper and
lower case here!)"
[1] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html
--
Tommi Vainikainen
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