language vs country
2019-08-11
One mistake you see all the time on websites and in interfaces: using national flags for picking a language. The Orient Finans Bank site, for example, offers three options, and each language name comes with a flag: the Uzbekistan flag for Uzbek, the Russian Federation flag for Russian, the United Kingdom flag for English.
the OFB site
But language and country don't depend on each other. People who use the site in Russian aren't necessarily citizens of Russia; Russian is used in most of the former Soviet states. And English is the most used language in the world (an official language in 55 countries), with almost no connection left to Great Britain (besides the name).
By the way, the English on the OFB site is good, but judging by the dates I couldn't tell which English they're using: American (January 7, 2022) or British (18 april 2019). One more fact: the screenshots on Artemy Lebedev's studio site show no language selector at all. My guess is OFB added it later on its own.
Flags lose whatever force they had when one country uses several languages or scripts. The president's official website, for instance, can't use flags: it would be stuck flying two flags, one for "OʻZB" (Uzbek in Latin script) and one for "ЎЗБ" (Uzbek in Cyrillic).
the president's site
Takeaways:
- write language names in the interface without flags: Oʻzbekcha, Русский, English;
- use the full name whenever possible, not abbreviations ("UZ", "RU", "EN").