Re: icons for languages

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 13:28 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> Would flags be appropriate/inappropriate?

No. Flags are not even appropriate to represent countries (more properly
called "territories"). Some flags are even considered offensive to some
users. Random examples: Taiwan's flag may be offensive to some people
from the Democratic Republic of China. Israel's flag may be offensive to
some Muslims or Arabs [1]. The new flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran
may be offensive to some monarchist Iranians (mostly living outside
Iran).

Apart from that, flags may not even distinguish territories. There are
certain different territories that use the same flag.

[1] Even Israel's name may be offensive to some people [2]. In software,
that has different solutions. A Microsoft employee once told me that
they know of two solutions. In early releases of their Arabic version of
their software, they simply blanked the translation of "Israel", so it
would appear as an empty field next to other countries in a drop-down
list. But that wasn't a very good solution, specially since Arabic is
also an official language of Israel. They then found that usually
Arabs/Muslims do not take the offense very seriously if "Palestine" is
also in any list that "Israel" is.

[2] In Iran, the newspapers and the officials usually call Israel "the
Zionist regime", and Jerusalem "Beyt-ol-Moghaddas" (they even transcribe
it that way to English). Also, they sometimes refer to Israel's
president not as "ra'is-e jomhour" (literally "head of republic") which
they use for every other republic, but simply as "rai's" ("head").

> Anything I should be aware
> of if I try to do that? Are there any other decent ways to do signify
> language visually?

The name of the language in its own language (and script) may be the
best thing to do. But even that may be controversial sometimes. For
example, the Azerbaijani speakers in Iran are divided into what their
language should be called in Azerbaijani. Some insist on (a translation
equivalent to) Turkish, others on Azerbaijani, others on Azerbaijani
Turkish, and a few on Azeri.

Sorry Luis, this is not an easy question to answer at all.

roozbeh