Flags are problematic and just shouldn’t be used to represent languages, ever. Fortunately, there’s a uniformly superior alternative: the name of the language, in itself rather than English. On average, people will recognise their language name faster than their flag, in part because that’s the way the mind works and in part because so many flags are so similar.
Speaking more generally, icons perform surprisingly badly, given how widely they’re used: among even basically literate people, text without icon practically always outperforms icon without text. (Perhaps surprisingly, even among illiterate people text tends to perform quite well, once they know what the corresponding function is. Icons are often lousy enough that both of these often devolve to memorisation and pattern matching, and words often have more varying shapes, which make them easier to remember.)
The real problem on this site is that its language selector dropdown is very poor: it’s unreasonably tiny, showing only 6 items at a time, out of its 99, with a lot of scrolling and even lazy rendering of those scrolling options, and the first 18 items are in no particular order, before the remainder are mostly in English name alphabetical order (though there are several that look to be out of order and/or mislabelled, e.g. Kannada is labelled Javanese, and Kanuri Kinyarwanda); and that it’s searchable by typing may not be obvious, and functionally broken in only matching the string displayed (e.g. “বাংলা” but not “Bengali” or ideally also “bn” and “ben” for the ISO 639 codes). It should instead show all of the options at once in a two-dimensional grid on larger displays, and have a little scrolling on mobile platforms, but certainly no fewer than 24 options visible at once on even comparatively small devices. It’s a case of using the wrong widget for the job. Just because it’s readily available doesn’t mean you should use it.
What a comprehensive comment. Thanks for sharing your feedback. Same page, we will be improving the structure as well as design of this crucial section. I think the best is getting feedback from local merchants specially when it comes to the businesses daily usages.
Speaking more generally, icons perform surprisingly badly, given how widely they’re used: among even basically literate people, text without icon practically always outperforms icon without text. (Perhaps surprisingly, even among illiterate people text tends to perform quite well, once they know what the corresponding function is. Icons are often lousy enough that both of these often devolve to memorisation and pattern matching, and words often have more varying shapes, which make them easier to remember.)
The real problem on this site is that its language selector dropdown is very poor: it’s unreasonably tiny, showing only 6 items at a time, out of its 99, with a lot of scrolling and even lazy rendering of those scrolling options, and the first 18 items are in no particular order, before the remainder are mostly in English name alphabetical order (though there are several that look to be out of order and/or mislabelled, e.g. Kannada is labelled Javanese, and Kanuri Kinyarwanda); and that it’s searchable by typing may not be obvious, and functionally broken in only matching the string displayed (e.g. “বাংলা” but not “Bengali” or ideally also “bn” and “ben” for the ISO 639 codes). It should instead show all of the options at once in a two-dimensional grid on larger displays, and have a little scrolling on mobile platforms, but certainly no fewer than 24 options visible at once on even comparatively small devices. It’s a case of using the wrong widget for the job. Just because it’s readily available doesn’t mean you should use it.