@Roboe I see your point, but I’m not sure we’ll be the inventors of better alternatives here.
I think the same symbols can mean different things, just look at the white flag.
I also think it should be possible for a person to identify as part of more than one group. I’m from Austria and we don’t have the best history with Germany, but still I don’t have a problem with using the german flag to indicate my mother tongue - just like I don’t mind seeing swastikas in Hindu or Buddhist temples.
Flags are far from perfect for representing languages, but they worked quite well so far.
Well there may not be emojis for them yet, but both regions have their own flags that could be used to represent the language too.
When it comes to help topics at least it’s always best to use a language many forum members use, to increase the chances for helpful replies. Topics in languages that are not widely spoken are probably only a good idea for local communities.
Maybe we should simply drop the language-indication for local community topics and use another icon for those, like: .
I just don’t want to go back to topic titles starting with [EN], [ES], [DE], not being able to see all topics of the same language at once and not being able to “mute” or “watch” a language.
If anyone ever finds a suitable (at least equally beautiful and straight forward) alternative for the flags I’m willing to change it. Actually renaming/“resymbolizing” the tags would take only a few seconds - the topic titles would have to be changed manually though.