This always annoys me. I land on a site that's in a language I don't understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and... it's all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië...
How does that make any sense? If I don't speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. "German" in Polish is "Niemiecki"... :|
Wouldn't it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?
Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?
Just bad UX design. Typically this should include flags or the language's name in the language if they really did a good job.
Flags don't represent languages and therefore shouldn't be used to represent languages.
Typically they're used for the counties where the language originated.
UK for English France for French Japan for Japanese Spain for Spanish Russia for Russian Portugal for Portuguese
No, typically they aren't, and if they do it's a bad idea. Only 4% of L1 Portuguese speakers live in Portugal. There is 4 languages in Switzerland. German originated in at least 3 countries. USisans will throw a hissy fit if they will have to click on anything but their favourite star spangled banner for their language.
It's a mess.
I thought you were trying to convince us not to use flags
What flag is for English? What flag is for Portuguese? What about Austria, do they got a language? What do we put under Chinese flag, Mandarin? Where do Cantonese go? Oh, what about Belarusian? There are at least three options, and two could get you in jail, choose carefully.
I'm just telling you what I've seen used. Typically it's a lot of European flags for languages that originate in Europe. So UK for English, German for German, French for French, Spain for Spanish. Belarusian would be the flag of...Belarus? Not sure why that's a challenge.
To your question about China - What should be used for Swahili? What should be used for Yarouba or Hausa or Shona or Chewa? Africa is the problem, and so the typical method for doing this is very Euro-centric.
Flags don't make sense.
Otherwise this is completely valid:
( ) German 🇧🇷
( ) Italian 🇧🇷
( ) Japanese 🇧🇷
Tell me... Where did, roughly speaking, German originate? Germany, perhaps?
Does Germany have a flag?
Not sure why this is some sort of hidden secret code.
German language as we know it now, predates Germany by at least 500 years, originated, roughly speaking, in the area that is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and in small part Belgium and Netherlands.
It only simple and easy if you don't know about it and don't care. But people who use the language, surprisingly, do care.
Please try and look at this as a reasonable person.
Do you go to Italy, see a QR code on a table in a cafe, and berate them about their online menu showing an Italian flag, but the Italian language predates the Italian Republic?
It's simple because this is someone coding a site in one language, and then likely running it through Google Translate to get other options. Maaaaybe with a single human reviewing it of they're lucky. But likely not even that.
Not every website has a translation team of 20 or 30 PhDs working to ensure optimal linguistic understanding and anthropological and historical accuracy. Likewise, no, I'm very sorry to tell you that people very often don't really care about others. If pay 3 people in India, or ask an LLM, to code a website with German translation, either the drop down will say Deutsch or it'll say that and have a German flag. What should Austria have, a tiny picture of Mozart but the site is still just German?
There are some German dialects that only survive (barely) in Brazil.
And the German language is much older than Germany.
German dialects are still....German language, yes?
They are more different than any of the Englishes are from each other
What flag do you use for english ?
🏴
Best answer up to this point
Use the UK flag if the site is in English and use the American flag if it's in Webster English. Seems pretty evident to me.
A split combo of the two is pretty common.
English is an official language in 53 countries, and primary language in 29. You can attempt to split it, but that wouldn't be very pleasant picture.