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105 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
105 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
# Graphical representation of languages?
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<small>2024-08-18 | [@andrea](/@andrea)</small>
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Placing graphical elements next to text labels is a cool design trick – it helps your brain skip a few steps when
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navigating a user interface: instead of reading the label it can immediately know what a button is doing just by glancing at the icon.
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That's the reason why most buttons on our website have a corresponding icon – and you can only imagine how much easier
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it makes the work on the project! I can easily navigate *any* language version without understanding a single word of it,
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just because I remember which icons are marking which button.
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It's also a reason why many user interfaces put flags next to language names. Is it really a good approach, though?
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After all, flags represent countries, not languages – and if the ideological and political complications
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of mixing up those two concepts don't convince you,
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the practical issues hopefully will: languages simply cannot be mapped one-to-one with countries.
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First example that comes to mind: which flag should represent English?
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It originated in 🏴 England, but it's also spoken / official in the rest of the 🇬🇧 United Kingdom,
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in the 🇺🇸 United States, 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇮🇳 India, and many others.
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Why would we pick one over another? If we go with place of origin, would most people even recognise the flag of England?
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If we go by population size, wouldn't the flag of India make people think of Hindi rather than English?
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Similar issues arise with other languages. Which flag should represent Spanish? 🇪🇸 Spain, 🇲🇽 Mexico, 🇦🇷 Argentina, 🇨🇴 Colombia?
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Which flag should represent Portuguese? 🇵🇹 Portugal, 🇧🇷 Brazil? Which flag should represent Arabic?
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🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia, 🇪🇬 Egypt, 🇮🇶 Iraq, 🇱🇧 Lebanon?
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Many languages aren't recognised as official languages of any country. Some groups of speakers, like Silesians or Basques,
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have a flag for their region, but others, like Ladino speakers, don't – they don't even occupy a single region.
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Some constructed languages might have a flag, like Esperanto does, but others simply do not.
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And even if a good candidate for a flag exists, it might not be universally accepted by the speakers of the language,
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and it might be harder to use – for example, I was able to easily add country flag emojis to this text,
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but embedding an Esperanto or Basque flag in a text would require way more effort.
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People have been designing flags that would represent languages better than country flags – for example
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by combining elements of flags of countries where the language is spoken. Here's a fun video exploring a bunch of ideas:
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{embed=//youtube.com/embed/2I3UJkDmMco=What are "Language Flags?" (And Should They Exist?)}
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As the number of language versions of our project grows, we've been discussing ideas to make it easier to find the one people are looking for
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– without using country flags.
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I've created a proof-of-concept for an approach in which we pick a single grapheme from a language that can represent it –
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for example `ß` for German, `ñ` for Spanish or `ą` for Polish – and we put it on a background colour that represents the language family –
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like Germanic, Romance or Slavic, respectively.
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This approach is not ideal either. It's still a very arbitrary choice: why not use `ł` for Polish? Should Swedish get `å`, or should Norwegian?
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The English alphabet is quite boring, should we just pick a random Latin letter, or maybe take a risk of not being understood and use historical `þ`?
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Those graphemes are admittedly less recognisable than the flags we're used to seeing representing languages –
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while it might be a good idea in a long run, it doesn't really help much in the short term.
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Another approach we've been looking into was using a map. While speakers of any language might be located literally anywhere,
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it is generally possible to mark a general area where the language is commonly spoken.
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Unfortunately, finding an open source dataset of those areas is not easy,
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and even if we had it, we'd still need to deal with issues like overlapping territories,
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or some areas being too small to click on while others would span across continents.
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Instead, we tried using a dataset of simple lat/long coordinates for each language from [The World Atlas of Language Structures](https://wals.info/),
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each language being represented by a single dot on a map, in a general “centre of gravity” as picked by the linguists who created that dataset.
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But we're still not really getting rid of the main problem with mixing up languages with countries –
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while it might help Polish speakers quickly find and click on the dot in the middle of Poland,
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for users from the US it probably wouldn't be obvious to look around England.
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And where would we even put Esperanto or Toki Pona?
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This map is not supposed to be an accurate mapping of languages, the idea was not to draw out where exactly each language is spoken –
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that's a very difficult thing to do (and also not our job). The map was supposed to be just an extra tool to help with the overwhelm when visiting
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the page and seeing an ever-growing list of languages without any graphical helpers (like flags).
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It would allow some users to immediately find the language they're looking for by just glancing on a map –
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while others could still fall back to the simple list of languages.
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But ultimately, we decided that this approach is too far from good to be actually put on the website.
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What we ended up implementing on the main homepage at [pronouns.page](https://pronouns.page),
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is simply adding a few helpers to the existing “raw” list of languages.
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We can use the list of preferred languages as specified by the user in their browser settings – and show a few suggestions on top;
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this way it's very likely that they'll see what they're looking for right away.
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Underneath there's a full list without any extra graphical elements, but now it gets a filter –
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one can just start typing the name of the language they're looking for
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(either [endonym or exonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym)) or its ISO code – and they'll find it right away.
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The list isn't perfect either. How do you even sort languages alphabetically if they use different scripts?
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You could use the romanisation of their names, like Wikipedia does, but it's still a bit eurocentric
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and doesn't account for languages with multiple romanisations like Thai.
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We could sort the languages by popularity (eg. number of cards in our database),
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but while it would make it _more likely_ to easily find your language for more people on average,
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it wouldn't actually make it easy to find in general.
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For now, we've been treating Latin and non-Latin scripts differently,
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due to the composition and popularity of the languages currently present,
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but that's likely to change with more versions coming.
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Of course, we're nowhere near Wikipedia. With 18 language versions of Pronouns.page currently published,
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all of that is not a _massive_ problem, people can easily scan the whole list and find what they're looking for.
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But considering that there are also 47 language channels on our Discord server, in various stages of completion,
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the question will become more pressing with time. But even if it doesn't –
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isn't it fun to explore and discuss all of those ideas?
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So, what do y'all think about this issue? Do you have better ideas?
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Is there an approach that would solve all the issues and become a useful standard for listing languages in user interfaces?
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We're very open to experiments!
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