Using flags for language choice

I ran across a post recently about using flags in your UI as a way for a user to select the language of the text (and possibly UI direction). While I agree with the post, the main point that drives me to use text in the native language as the way to choose the native language could be emphasized more as a way to help people think about what a flag represents as opposed to what a language name represents.

A national flag represents a nation (country). A language name represents a language.

Take a look at YouTube or Google News. YouTube best illustrates this point. Take a minute and visit the homepage, and check out the country and language selections at the top. Both flags and language names are used! Google News takes a similar approach, except without the use of flags at all, instead opting to use the name of the country. This illustrates the point I think should be clearer. When I click on the flag of Germany in YouTube’s UI, I now get content primarily from Germany, but my UI is still in English. When I click on Deutsch, I get a German user interface. I can also have a German user interface with content from or relevant to France. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong or confusing with switching the user’s interface to the language most likely to be used in the country that the content is primarily from, but that really depends on your users. Of course, so does everything, and if your users want flags to represent languages, that’s what they’ll get, and nobody on the internet is going to convince them otherwise :)

Summary of my personal uses:

Use the German flag when the content is German in origin or relevant to Germany
Use Deutsch when the user interface will be switched to that language

Consider also that not everyone is able to see flags, and if your site is accessible you will need to have the text explaining the flag anyway. Doing things as described above keeps things very simple, easy for users to understand, and makes clear the distinction between geographic content relevance and content language.