Matthew,
I am well aware of problems caused by using national flags. If you could take the time to look at the UI designs further you’ll see that it is specified that “All layouts and input methods have an icon which is written in the respective native character set. In essence whatever is in the icon, is the same kind of glyph that will be drawn to screen”.
The term “flags” is used because it is the terminology used to describe icons for layouts in both the code and the gconf key. I specified this here to remove confusion over the term flags. ”Flag – An icon representing the current keyboard layout” in the terminology section was intended to remove confusion regarding this.
Even looking at the UI designs should have been informative enough that you wouldn’t assume we were using actual national flags.
BTW one thing Windows does right is that it does not have a keyboard indicator but a language indicator. It may seem the same thing but it is fundamentally more powerful.
With a language indicator, the user can declare different languages, and map them either to different layouts, or to the same one. So when he uses a layout that permits typing different languages (for example, all latin layout permit typing English in addition to the local language), he can switch languages without switching layouts.
And apps can query the language state and know what spellchecker to use automagically.
With a keyboard indicator, this is not possible. Say the layout is AZERTY. That means the primary language of the user is French. But is he typing French, English, or Italian ? They can all be typed with AZERTY, and no user is going to switch to QWERTY (interverting A, and Q) to signal apps he just switched to English.
Nicolas makes a great point. Another advantage of the Windows model is that applications like Word know if you’re typing in a right-to-left language, thus making all text in that language right-to-left. I have never seen any non-Windows applications get this right. Instead, applications like OpenOffice.org and Abiword guess based on context, which leads to things like parenthesis coming out all wrong.
Another advantage of this language-specific model is that you can be very precise about which dialect of a language you’re speaking, whether it’s a specific country’s version of English, or one of the many different dialects of Arabic. Spell-checking is one of several uses for this precise metadata.
All this tells me that the country flag can actually be quite useful—in conjunction with the language name. Showing some sort of combination of flag and language would be ideal, especially if applications can be modified to take advantage of that precise information.