Language flags

[guillemc23]

I'm not sure if this has been already considered, but what about a flag to represent the English language to be used on a language selector? I'm thinking of something like half US half UK. The same could be done with other widespread languages like Spanish.

Amazing library by the way, so glad I found it!

[HatScripts]

Hi @guillemc23, the en-us flag already exists:

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/en-us.svg

[guillemc23]

My bad, I couldn't find it in the gallery. What about something like this?

Thank you!

[HatScripts]

Done. Please let me know what you think.

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/es-mx.svg

[waldyrious]

That slight misalignment of the horizontal/vertical bands is bothering me a bit, not gonna lie 😅 Have you considered scaling up the Mexico flag a bit (or even —gasp— adjusting the proportions of the flags slightly) so that the divisions align?

[waldyrious]

By the way, if it's not asking too much, would you consider also one for Portuguese? There are some examples here.

I kinda like this one given its simplicity:

but honestly I don't think it would work well as a circular flag.

A while ago I made some experiments myself with a simplified hybrid:

but I don't really like it (which is why I never published it).

So perhaps something more straightforward, like this, would work better:

WDYT?

[HatScripts]

That slight misalignment of the horizontal/vertical bands is bothering me a bit, not gonna lie 😅 Have you considered scaling up the Mexico flag a bit (or even —gasp— adjusting the proportions of the flags slightly) so that the divisions align?

The misalignment exists in the example flag that @guillemc23 posted:

[waldyrious]

Yes, sure but these simplified flags already take some artistic liberty anyway, so additional adjustments to make them align wouldn't be totally out of place. That said, I did a quick experiment and I'm not convinced that an aligned version works better:

The top and right stripes being lined up kind of break the diagonal division effect in the upper right corner of the drawing.

Of course, we could also add a dividing line there, but it certainly doesn't feel as neat:

So maybe it is indeed best to just keep them as-is — which has the added benefit of being compatible with the existing es and mx flags.

[HatScripts]

So perhaps something more straightforward, like this, would work better:

How's this?

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/pt-br.svg

[guillemc23]

Done. Please let me know what you think.

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/es-mx.svg

I think this looks very neat! The misalignment feels a bit weird but I think that's how it should be and so it's best to keep it that way. I also liked that you included both coat of arms even if they collide at the center. I'm only concerned by the philosophical dilema of "Does the mexican flag represent Spanish speaking America well enough?" but I have seen this flag in various sites simbolyzing the Spanish language, so I think it will do 😂

How's this?

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/pt-br.svg

I also think this design works perfectly fine.

I have also thought of other widespread language like French, and I have found these results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_internationale_de_la_Francophonie
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Flag_of_French_language.svg
To be fair, I have never seen any of these anywhere but just I'm posting them just in case you want to consider them.

[waldyrious]

How's this?

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/pt-br.svg

Nice! My brain keeps trying to come up with ways to make the designs align (e.g. move the yellow circle of the Portugal flag to the center so that it matches the blue circle of the Brazil flag, or just move it slightly so that its border continues seamlessly from the border of Brazil flag's lozenge), but I don't think we gain much either aesthetically or practically from such efforts. So yeah, to me it's good to keep as-is!

I have also thought of other widespread language like French

I was thinking that this issue is pretty open-ended; maybe we should try to cover the top most spoken languages as a threshold to close the issue? According to Wikipedia's List of languages by total number of speakers and List of languages by number of native speakers, these are the languages that have the most speakers (both native and as a second-language):

• Arabic → language/ar.svg
• Bengali
• English → language/en-us.svg
• French
• Hindi
• Japanese → language/ja.svg
• Mandarin Chinese
• Portuguese → language/pt-br.svg
• Russian → language/ru.svg
• Spanish → language/es-mx.svg
• Urdu
• Vietnamese
• Western Punjabi
• Yue Chinese

WDYT?

[guillemc23]

Arabic already has a flag. The flag looks a lot like the Saudi Arabian but it actually says "arabic" in the center, so it's easy to miss 😄

https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/ar.svg

I agree that this issue is open ended, but I don't think all of those languages need to have a specific flag. A vast majority of Russian or Japanese are from Russia or Japan. I don't think it's about the number of speakers, I think it has to do with how the speakers are distibuted.

[waldyrious]

I agree that this issue is open ended, but I don't think all of those languages need to have a specific flag. A vast majority of Russian or Japanese are from Russia or Japan. I don't think it's about the number of speakers, I think it has to do with how the speakers are distibuted.

That's kind of my point, though. We might want to explicitly decide whether to have a custom language flag for those languages, or use the one of the country overwhelmingly associated with them.

I will add Arabic, Japanese and Russian flags above. We probably can do the same for Hindi, Chinese and Vietnamese. Not exactly sure about the others — e.g. Western Punjabi appears to be associated with Pakistan more so than India, even though the flag for the Punjabi language, https://hatscripts.github.io/circle-flags/flags/language/pa.svg, defaults to the flag of India.

[lagleki]

if possible please add symbols for

• Esperanto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.svg
• Lojban https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lojban_logo.svg
• toki pona https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toki_Pona_flag.svg

[waldyrious]

Following up on this thread: I recently submitted #146 to add a language/pt-pt.svg -> pt.svg alias (symlink) for the Portuguese language, in addition to the existing language/pt.svg -> pt.svg. I erroneously assumed there was already an alias for English: language/en-gb.svg -> gb.svg, but the argument for the pt-pt alias still stands, since it is indeed commonly used to refer specifically to the European Portuguese variety, as opposed to the more demographically dominant Brazilian variety.

I believe it could be a good idea to add similar symlinks for other languages that are closely associated to a country which does not account for the majority of the speakers, and therefore are likely to have the "origin" variety referred to specifically by a disambiguated language code.

That said, currently only Portuguese, English and Spanish have multiple varieties in circle-flags, so it might make sense to add aliases only for them (specifically, en-gb and es-es) ; for the others it would likely be overkill.

[waldyrious]

In addition to symlinks for the origin variety of languages for which there are existing variant flags, we might want to also add flags for other language varieties, especially when they are prominent. For example, French comes to mind as another language with many global varieties.

We could look into Wikipedia's Lingua franca article for a set of possible candidates for languages with significant presence in multiple geographies (which is distinct from the most spoken languages listed above). Or, to make it simpler, focus on the official UN languages:

• English
• French
• Spanish
• Russian
• Chinese
• Arabic

(Spanish is partially covered, as we only have Mexican Spanish out of its variants), so I left its checkbox unticked.)