Hmm, I’ll revive this topic because I think there’s something probably wrong with all this flag-as-language-symbol thingy, specially future-wise.
I am an Spanish-speaking person living in Madrid, which is the capital of Spain. It’s true that all people in Spain speak in Castilian Spanish (es_ES). So, in my mind of monolingual person* educated in a monolingual environment, the flag of my country could be used as the symbol of my language. But I think that is a falacy. Why? Becase Spanish is not only spoken in Spain (a big portion of America was once under the crown of Castile until they fought for their independence), and inside Spain there are a lot more languages spoken, four of those are cooficial languages (Catalonian/Valencian/Balearic, Basque, Galician, Aranese).
Flags symbolize countries, not languages. I don’t know what is the flag of Colombia, or Peru, or Bolivia. But they need to know what is the flag of my country to look for our mutual language? Not fair.
Futhermore, Euskara (Basque) and Catalonian are spoken in the internet (I don’t know about Galician), but there aren’t emoji flags for Catalonian or Basque Country (which is not a country, despite its name). What would we do if @iratxe or @laurent_guerguy wanted to open topics in Euskara or Catalonian for their respective local fairphoners?
Also, there are countries without a clear single official language, like Switzerland, which joins four monolingual regions. What language their flag should symbolize?
While writting this reply I’ve found some useful links:
- Flags are not languages - “Why flags do not represent languages?” http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/
- Authoring techniques from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - “Don’t use flags to indicate languages!” https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-link-lang#flags
*= Well, I speak Spanish, English and some Catalonian plus I can read French and Galician without much trouble, so I’m not strictly a monolingual person, but I’ve been educated in a monolingual educational environment that only promotes English as a second language, probably because of the cultural globalization process (although in some contexts like some specific work environments it crazily seems that our own language has no value).