Flag hover to see language name

On someone’s profile page, you put the cursor over a flag and the name of the language is displayed.

This does not work on the forum pages. Although you can see the nationality for the flag beside the user name, you don’t see the language names for the flags displayed to the right of the roses symbol.

Since it works on the profile pages, I think it should be possible to get it working on the forum pages.

Also, I wonder if there is a reference page on the website showing all the flags in one place.

While on the topic, I notice that the thread originator’s post shows more than 3 language flags sometimes, whereas subsequent posts are limited to 3 language flags. Could this be altered so that more than 3 flags are shown for subsequent posts, when the person has more than 3 languages on the profile page? I can see this might result in line wrapping for deeply indented posts, but in most cases there is room for more than 3 language flags.

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You have five flags. I have only two flags. Some people don’t like to see about your username the flags that stand for countries instead of languages.

“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…”

Why flags do not represent languages
http://flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-represent-language/

“Probably the most common motivation for using a flag as a language symbol is that it is expected to catch the eye better than text does.”
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

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You raise an interesting point. But for now I’ll stick to my original concern, which was about the language flags and not the nationality flags.

The flag icons are visually attractive, but I’m interested in languages, not flags.

I would rather have 3-letter ISO 639-2 codes than flags:

If flags were replaced with 3-letter codes, it would still be necessary to display the full name of the language upon cursor hover, since not everyone would know for example that cmn is the code for Mandarin and ell is the code for Modern Greek.

But it would be more work for LingQ staff to switch from flags to ISO codes, so I was merely asking for hover to provide the info on language names.

Hi Greg,
Thanks for your suggestion. I do agree that it would be nice if hovering over flag could provide info on language names.
Once when we take care of some more urgent bugs on the site, I will suggest this to our development team.

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" I do agree that it would be nice if hovering over flag could provide info on language names."
The point is that only language names are relevant.
National flags could be replaced with “3-letter codes” for languages as Xophist proposed. I detest flashy signs on web pages since I champion the minimalist design of web pages. They are simply eyesores and delay the appearance of the page.

I don’t think that we will replace flags with 3-letter codes in near future. Language names are relevant, and that is why it would be enough if hovering over flag provide info on language name.
Btw, I am also fan of simple designs of web pages.

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