Using flag to identify spoken language

Question

In the webapp I am doing, I need to identify language people are speaking. I wanted to use flag to do that. But I have some problems.

For example, if you speak French, you can put the French flag. But if you speak English you can put either the US or UK flag or a mix of both.

Which flag to choose for Arabic language ? Saudi Arabian flag ? Algeria ? Morocco ?

Answer 1

I think it's usual to use fragments of the language as a kind of graphic (text, instead of flags), for example:

• english
• français
• русский язык
• العربية
• 中文

Answer 2

The answer is to not use flags to identify languages. Not only there isn't a one-to-one mapping, and you won't cover all languages that way (Kurdish?), but some flags may be controversial (consider Taiwan flag for Traditional Chinese).

Answer 3

As many other answers stated, it's clearly a bad idea to use flags for languages.

See arguments here: Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult?

Answer 4

Language and nationality are different terms, if your English translation is American English, you should use American flag, for British English use England flag and so on. There are lots of dialects in Arabic so which flag you should use depends on which language/dialect you use.

Answer 5

You know that the browser sends a list of locales that the user likes? And you can choose from them inside your webserver to select the one the person likes the most?

You can see here how the Debian project has solved this issue: http://www.debian.org/intro/cn