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Small flags (or their icon approximation) for making links to web pages written in other languages (mainly European). Apart for the first one, Esperanto, specially created for international exchanges, the top row is dedicated to major imperial languages used in several countries, or even several continents, and/or by populations numbering in the hundreds of millions. The symbol used is normally the flag of the country from which the language originates (e.g. Britain rather than the United States or Australia). For Arabic and Chinese (the latter still to come), choosing a representative country is either meaningless or unacceptable in part of the area where the language is used. This is why these languages are (will be) represented simply by their name, in their own writing. The second row is dedicated to minority languages of western Europe, spoken by communities to whom history has denied sovereign institutions (and sometimes any institution at all) and/or by only a fraction of the population in the relevant region or country. The flag of the Republic of Ireland is being used to symbolize Irish (Gaelic), spoken in practice by a (small) minority of people in its own realm, but which is recognised as an official language by the country. In the other cases, the flags are those used by the relevant communities to identify themselves, if only unofficially. The third row is dedicated, with similar conventions as for the first row, to national languages, i.e with an official and majority practice in one country, possibly extending to one or two neighbouring countries. In all cases, the languages are identified by the file names. The latter are written langYY.gif, where YY is a (lower case) two-letter code used by the ISO 639 norm to identify the relevant language. The same codes are used to declare the language of HTML pages in the META tags of their headers, or to specify the lang attribute. In some cases, these codes are similar to ISO 3136 country codes (e.g. fr for both France and the French language), in others they are different (e.g. br for Brazil as a country code, but for Breton as a language code).
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