Talk:Universal Language Selector Mobile

two character to indicate a language
You mention a two letter code to indicate a language. Many if not most of our Wikipedia language have three letters. Thanks, Gmeijssen (talk) 10:53, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * ah, then two/three letters it is depending on the language --Planemad (talk) 12:43, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

what language is spoken in what country
Are you aware how many languages are spoken in the United States? It is not only English and the native American languages. There are several languages not originating in the USA who have a substantial number of speakers.. think Chinese, Arabic, Korean but also Hmong ...

The notion that flags help indicate languages spoken is a long standing fallacy. Thanks, Gmeijssen (talk) 10:53, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Choosing the US should obviously give languages like Spanish, Polish etc that are common there. The languages you would get on selecting a country should include common ones used by the population. You would obviously not have Zulu if you selct the US. The idea is to eliminate irrelevant languages from a selection list by using the country as a filter. If you were a Korean person in US and you had no idea to read English, then you would need to select Korea as the country to get the Korean language, it just does not make sense that he would choose the American flag rather than the Korean one to get his language. Would you argue that an Arab immigrant in the US would select the US flag rather than his own home country? --Planemad (talk) 11:52, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The argument is with flags as a metaphor. They stink. Gmeijssen (talk) 10:50, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Could you be a little more descriptive of why flags would be difficult/controversial for a user? A scenario would really help me understand why you would think that this is such an extreme problem and to improve upon the proposal--Planemad (talk) 12:41, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * As far as I can see flags would here be used to indicate countries, which I suppose is fine, and not languages, which would indeed be bad. SPQRobin (talk) 12:57, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * According to WolphramAlpha's statistics, Polish is less spoken in the United States than Chinese, Arabic, or Korean. --Yair rand (talk) 15:34, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Countries
Using individual countries as units for language divisions could be problematic for a number of reasons: --Yair rand (talk) 16:46, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
 * What is or isn't a "country" is really disputed, and we have no real way of deciding one way or another whether something is a country. (Do we use the flag of South Ossetia/any other disputed area for people in that region?)
 * Languages divides don't really work well for countries. Inuktitut is spoken by 69.5% of Nunavut, but it probably wouldn't even be considered a major language for the entire country of Canada, for example. Similar situations occur in very many countries.
 * Do we even have a reliable way of finding out what country the user is located in? I think we can get a decent idea of where someone is based on their IP address, and are usually able to find out what country that is, but why would we make the understanding of what languages the user speaks more ambiguous than necessary by first matching IP area to country, and then country to language, rather than just directly figuring out as well as we can what languages are spoken by people with that set of IP addresses?