I wish there were some internationally recognized symbols to represent languages as distinct entities from their countries of origin, but the idea of trying to make some seems really unpopular for some reason.
There’s other languages that have far more politically contentious flags representing them - at least all the English-speaking countries are broadly allies. Spare a thought for the Taiwanese who have to select a People’s Republic of China flag, even though the language is as much theirs as it is the PRC’s, or the large number of Russian-speaking native Ukrainians who have to select the flag of the country who’s bombing them and their families.
The notion of a country owning a language is fraught with toxicity (indeed, Russia’s claim to vast swathes of Ukraine leans heavily on it), and if languages had their own flags we could sidestep the whole issue.
French has the fleur De lies which, although it was a symbol of French royalty is still used on the flag of Quebec and some places in Canada identify the French language option with the flag of Quebec.
Realistically, the best option would just be a shorted abbreviation of the language in that language. Ex. Eng for English and deu for German
There is a set of ISO codes for each language, but it’s not catchy used as an icon, and are also implicitly Western-centric by virtue of using the Latin alphabet.
I wish there were some internationally recognized symbols to represent languages as distinct entities from their countries of origin, but the idea of trying to make some seems really unpopular for some reason.
There’s other languages that have far more politically contentious flags representing them - at least all the English-speaking countries are broadly allies. Spare a thought for the Taiwanese who have to select a People’s Republic of China flag, even though the language is as much theirs as it is the PRC’s, or the large number of Russian-speaking native Ukrainians who have to select the flag of the country who’s bombing them and their families.
The notion of a country owning a language is fraught with toxicity (indeed, Russia’s claim to vast swathes of Ukraine leans heavily on it), and if languages had their own flags we could sidestep the whole issue.
French has the fleur De lies which, although it was a symbol of French royalty is still used on the flag of Quebec and some places in Canada identify the French language option with the flag of Quebec.
Realistically, the best option would just be a shorted abbreviation of the language in that language. Ex. Eng for English and deu for German
There is a set of ISO codes for each language, but it’s not catchy used as an icon, and are also implicitly Western-centric by virtue of using the Latin alphabet.