RFC: Remove flags from language representations

There’s a strong argument against using flags to represent languages. Flags are symbols for countries, however, a language may be spoken in many countries while a single country may have multiple official+unofficial languages. This makes flags at least a weak, usually blatantly wrong, and in some cases offensive representation for a language.

Here’s a good summary resource for this argument: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/

I believe it would be a good decision to drop flags from the progress report panel and anywhere else in the UI.

The exception may be when the language key includes a locale. en is English without geographical context, so it could be for UK, Australia, Malta or India, or even Japan, you wouldn’t know. en-US is clearly for United States, which makes it ok (but still unnecessary) to use a flag.

I believe the best representation would be the name of the language in itself, optionally followed by the name of the language in the language of the editor/OS

• English
• Français - French
• Svenska - Swedish
• Türkçe - Turkish

[antfu]

Emmm… I don’t know. I am happy to provide a config field to disable flags if anyone feels being “offensive” (although it’s absolutely not intentional).

Anyway, I am feeling that I am not knowledgeable enough to make the decision (to completely drop it). I have pinned this issue and labeled rfc. I would love to hear comments from anyone. Thanks in advance.

[antfu]

I am trying to find some balance point to this issue.

Now in v2.2.4

Config to disable the flags

"i18n-ally.showFlags": false

Not to use language code as country code

Two letters locales are not be used as country code to display flags anymore. While BCP-47 with region/country code will try to match a flags

If you have preference on mapping a two letter locale to country code, you can do it in config:

"i18n-ally.localeCountryMap": {
  "en": "br", // show UK's flag instead of US's
  "zh": "cn", // show Chinese flag for 'zh'
  "ko": "ko", // show Korean flag for 'ko'
}

Let me know if you have any comments. Thanks