Flammie

Flammie A Pirinen on github pages

Project maintained by flammie Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Flammie on using flags to mean languages

This is a thing I remember discussing about in 1990โ€™s in the Usenet news, the internet forum of choice back in the day. It was a common topic to debate in the web authoring groups, I think we quite systematically decided that flags as symbols of languages is a bad idea. One of the more popular writings of the time is Flags as a symbol of language โ€“ stupidity or insult by J. Korpela, a prolific Usenet writer and book author, etc. The fact that we had a consensus on how bad idea this was in 1990s, makes it ever so much more annoying that we still face the issue in

  1. And it is not few uninformed individuals making the mistake, it is highly respected computational linguists studying language typology who should know better.

The mistakes

  1. Flag is symbol of country not language
  2. The relation between flags and languages is of course not 1:1, but can be n:m for any values of n, m including 0.
  3. If the pure logicaรถ inaccuracy of the mismatches above is not enough, it is often rude or offensive to use a certain flag with some languages for some subset of the language speakers and their cultures. Flags are symbols of countries and typically political

Let us study some examples:

  1. English is spoken as official language in dozens of countries, if we used the logic that gets used in minority language flags,
    • it would be ok to flag all English corpora with flags of ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ฌ ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ธ ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ง ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ฟ ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ผ ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ณ (Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Botswana or Brunei, i.e. the alphabetically first countries with English as official langauge)
    • or how about ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ (English flag)
    • or ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ช (flag of UAE)?
  2. Minority languages (i.e. not national languages) are often spoken in number of countries perhaps along border regions, with some or all host countries having rather sub-optimal language politics, having your language to be marked with flag of such entity is quite bad
    • perhaps languages in India and Pakistan or China and nearby territories for example (again, I am not good in history / politics / geopolitics, there probably are better examples)
  3. Even non-minority languages can be part of (political) fights where all relevant flags will offend some of the language users
    • this happens just as well with flags of the USA and Great Britain, see also Republic of Ireland
    • Spanish and Portugese in South America
  4. Some languages have number of semi-official flags that are tangled with political issues,
    • e.g. I have written some corpus material in Karelian languages and choice can be between Russian flag for Karelian Republic or flag of East Karelia (or just Russian or Finnish flag of course), I am not politically savvy enough to decide and I see language activists use both