How to offend most of your international users all at once

This article originally appeared on my personal dev blog: redirects to . And, optionally, you can include a hover text with the name of the language in that language. For example, FR [Français]. If you need to distinguish between variants of the same language, you can use the subtags from the IETF language tags. For example, PT-BR [português brasileiro]. If you're convinced, you could stop reading now. If not, here are some example problems.

Brazil 🇧🇷

Commonly used to represent Portuguese. There are over 100 Amerindian languages spoken in Brazil. There are also differences between Brazilian Portuguese and the Portuguese used in Portugal.

Chad 🇹🇩

Indistinguishable from the flag of Romania. The two official languages are French and Arabic. Setting aside using the flag of France for French, which flag are you going to choose for Arabic that isn't going to upset the occupants of at least one other Arabic-speaking nation?

France 🇫🇷

Commonly used to represent French. France has many regional languages, including Basque, Breton, Catalan and Corsican. French is one of the main languages in countries including Belgium and Switzerland. French is also a major language in many former French colonies that aren't too happy about having been colonized by France.

Germany 🇩🇪

Commonly used to represent German. Germany has many regional languages, including, Low Rhenish, North Frisian and Saterland Frisian. German is also the main language in Austria and one of the main languages in Switzerland.

India 🇮🇳

The main two languages are Hindi and English. But there are hundreds of languages in use. At time of writing, the constitution mentions 22 languages, with demands to add another 38.

Mexico 🇲🇽

Commonly used to represent Spanish. The federal government recognizes over 50 linguistic groups and over 300 varieties of indigenous languages. Spanish is spoken throughout South America, but there is no homogenous Latin American dialect. There are at least 16 languages besides Spanish and Portuguese used in South America with at least 125,000 speakers. Spanish as spoken in the Americas differs from that spoken in Spain. Spain itself has many regional languages, including Basque, Catalan and Galician.

United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Commonly used to represent English. English is an official language in over 50 states, although that doesn't include the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia or New Zealand. At the time of writing, the only official language in the UK is Welsh, and the only official flags are the Welsh and Scots flags. As I've mentioned before in other posts, there are two distinct spelling systems (Cambridge; -ise endings, and Oxford; -ize endings). Cambridge is used in most of the former colonies, except Canada (which has its own versions of English and French). The IETF advocates using the two-letter country code in addition to the ISO two-letter language code, but that produces EN-GB, which doesn't tell you if you're using Cambridge or Oxford. Also, much to the annoyance of the English, American is the most commonly used English dialect. I therefore propose the following codes:

• (American) English: EN (the lingua franca, to the annoyance of the French)


• Australian English: EN-AU (the official Australian version)


• Cambridge English: EN-IE (same as Hiberno-English, an official language of Ireland)


• Canadian English: EN-CA (any version of English that doesn't closely follow a single dialect)


• New Zealand English: EN-NZ (vowel-reduced English)


• Oxford English: EN-OX (English for classics scholars)


• South African English: EN-ZA (English where vowels are entirely optional)


• Strine: EN-OZ (the version of Australian English as it's actually used)

Image: The Esperanto flag, in case you were wondering.

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