It’s quite colonialist to use country flags for languages.
Many English or French speaking countries have a bad association with 
or 
.
I think Discourse depreciated emoji in tags. At least it doesn’t work in another forum either.
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Thanks, that came up in my search there, too.
But if I didn’t miss anything important while browsing through, it doesn’t work like that anymore …
While that is true, that doesn’t make the languages anything other than English and French, and using the flags for depicting them is established and well-understood worldwide, even in countries which have a bad association with or .
What would you use instead (worldwide, think tourist signs and such)? I think ISO codes will not work well as icons for this any time soon … List of ISO 639 language codes - Wikipedia
I could rather think of an argument about languages not associated to a country with a flag, but that should have come up somewhere already, I guess … 📊 Language Tags - "Final" Vote
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You know that’s not the flag of England right?
No it’s not. The flags depict regions, not languages.
#english
Can tags be all-caps? I’m not taking a side here, just wondering if ISO codes could be capitalized if used as tags.
The issue I have is that the flags could denote Nations as in where the OP is that starts the topic, but then they could just note that in the text.
But then language can be defined by the text, although as more people will no doubt be familiar with national flags having a flag can indicate the language as if therefore more easy to select a topic to read.
So as mentioned, whereas colonialism does have it’s memory effect, I can’t see that as an issue if the purpose is to make it clearer if the language is something a person can deal with.
So the problem is why is a flag being used. So either none or one for each a) the flag b) the flag preceded by an uppercase L or 𝄞
I tend to interpret the flag as a language indicator
I don’t think so. Tags are all lowercase.
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Discourse should just introduce languages as a separate thing next to categories and tags.
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Yes, and the forum knows that, too, at least in anything other than tags. 
However, I don’t see this one much as an icon for the language anywhere, for whatever reason.
It is.
You just point out the conceptual problem, to which I don’t object at all, but you can’t deny how the flag icons are used worldwide in reality.
This sounds good.
Where else but the Fairphone forum do you still see flags as language indicators?
That’s so outdated and wrong.
I hinted at a broader scale earlier, but if you want to stay in the internet … language selectors on a myriad of websites.
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Lots of places
Many sites indicate a language by national flags as there is no set of icons for languages, and the language used is more ‘important’ when writing that the country of residence of the person
EDITED the image to show how the Fairphone shop do it.
Flag for Location | Text for language
What could be better
I see the England flag as national and the UK as a language, meaning , British English
But to note the UK flag is for GB & NI.
Britain is only England and Wales, for which there is no flag, so national flags can be misrepresentative of the people in that location.
So Flags for location and maybe language abbreviation for preferred custom/culture/ and identity.
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Your example shows the exact opposite of what you are saying. Clearly the flag represents the region and not the language on fairphone.com
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Def they are everywhere and I more and more feel I cant move the little finger without stumbling probably on someones feet somehow.
Before we talk about if its appropriate to use language flags we might need to start flagging all comments mentioning “chinese phones” e.g… And where start and where to end with such?
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I just remembered there was a moderator option to create tags in bulk by oploading a csv to the forum, will try later today when l have my laptop to see if it works for flags (except if another mod has the time to try).
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Its a flag…or not even it’s colored pixels arranged to look like a flag.
If that even causes people to feel uncomfortable…that is pretty worrying.
It’s used as nothing more then a pictograph to quickly and simply show some info.
And we are talking about (I assume) normal flags of existing countries…it’s not like putting the Nazi flag above a topic.
People are so good at finding problems where there are none.
But hey…that’s just me.
I feel if it bothers you (what ever it is) don’t look at it.
That is key in living in harmony…not to try and please some by taking away what others find totally normal.
But just agree that some think this…some think that…
It’s ok if 1 does not like something and equally ok when another does.
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