I am neither Uyghur nor Chinese but I have spent considerable time in the Uyghur homeland and am a speaker of Uyghur.

This is a sticky situation that has many layers and will most certainly leave no-one satisfied. It is *extremely* difficult to approach this issue without any bias, and I include myself in that judgement. Just wanted to get that out there.

The current flag for the Uyghur language is the flag of the First East Turkestan Republic - more detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...stan_Republic. I personally believe (NB, with my own personal biases in mind) that the original poster's conflation of the use of this flag with the principles of ISIS is wildly exaggerated. The ETR was founded in the wake of the political chaos that ensued when the governor of the region was assassinated and replaced by an incompetent official. It was formed in the wake of a populist rebellion that was highly motivated by the feeling that aggressive Sinicization policies were a threat to local Muslim identity.

To conflate today's ISIS with the ETR would be an anachronistic retconning of modern principles to the 1930s. Was there religious violence in the ETR, the imposition of Sharia law? Absolutely. But this violence truly is not very distinct when compared to other violent conflicts that were going all over in China at the time - the 1930s were pure chaos. The ETR may be better understood as simply one part of the political, cultural, and military boil that the whole area of China was undergoing.

Moreover, the logic really doesn't hold. The violence or moral indignation that a symbol may elicit in others really doesn't necessarily justify the removal of the symbol. After all, aren't their plenty of people who are morally outraged at the millions of people who died of starvation in the Great Leap Forward or were murdered in the Cultural Revolution, under the very flag that is used to represent Mandarin today? Aren't their plenty of righteously indignant Taiwanese Mandarin speakers who have claim to outrage at the PRC's flag representing Mandarin? This reasoning I'm putting forward here is deliberately flawed - an example of how outrage doesn't necessarily justify a removal.

The modern-day East Turkestan Islamic Movement is indeed a terrorist organization that uses a blue flag with the cresent and moon as well as the shahada written across the top. The first observation to make is that this flag is absolutely not the flag being used on Tatoeba. They draw from the same symbolism, but they are different. The co-opting of a symbol by a despised, despicable group does not necessarily delegitmize the symbol. After all, the ISIS flag has the shada - but so does the flag of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Should we kindly ask Saudi and Iranian embassies to remove their flag because of their offensive symbolism? Should Tatoeba change its current symbol for Persian? Going down this route really blurs the line between "evil terrorists" and "Muslims in general."

It is worth noting that the Uyghur flag, currently used by Tatoeba, has been adopted by the completely peaceful, non-terrorist Uyghur diaspora as a symbol of ethnic pride (see https://uyghuramerican.org/site...lm-Brown.jpg). Its often seen at protests in the West and in Turkey against the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which has been quite bad of late (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09...on-camp.html). That being said, the flag is legitimately a *cultural*, if not political symbol of a large number of Uyghurs in the diaspora. Why the diaspora? The flag is illegal in Xinjiang. If you have one and display it, you will get in trouble, pronto. Basically, the answer to the question "does this flag legimately represent the linguistic community as far as Tatoeba is concerned" can't be answered because most Uyghurs on the planet could not even give a frank answer.

As others have pointed out, this situation is also difficult because of the use of the Tibetan flag for the Tibetan language on this site. The exact same principles apply to Tibet as to Xinjiang - an ethnic group with aspirations to nationhood that indeed was a separate nation at the time of the ETR, which eventually became a part of the PRC. The Tibetan flag is also banned in China and displaying it will get a Tibetan detained. It is used extensively in the Tibetan diaspora community and is the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala. I believe that most Chinese are less offended by the Tibetan flag because there is no "global Islamic terrorism" narrative that the Tibetans can be shoved into, and because there is this alternative Richard Gere-esque "peaceful, serene Buddhists" narrative that is easy to buy into for both Chinese and Westerners alike. As an interesting side note, there as an armed Tibetan rebellion in 1959 in which 2000 Chinese died, so if the original poster is offended by the questionable connections between the Uyghur flag and ISIS then he should be equally offended by the Tibetan flag as well.

Soliloquist, I see you made a good faith effort to get in touch with the Uyghur American Organization and the Uyghur Congress regarding the flag, motivated by the idea to get more Uyghurs into the picture. I can tell you before you even respond that two things will happen: first, both these organizations will answer affirmatively that the flag represents their community. As I said, the symbol has been adopted by the diaspora and many people in these organizations are people who deliberately fled China to escape perspecution. Second, Chinese users will not accept their answers as in China these organizations are depicted as US puppet/shadow organizations that are hell bent on the destruction of the PRC.

Okay, enough of that. I hope this information helps and contextualizes things. I believe I'm being accurate when I say that Tatoeba ultimately does not care about politics and only wants the flags to be representative of the linguistic community. What I add here is that when it comes to the Uyghurs, you can't separate politics from representativeness. There is a community of diaspora Uyghurs who will say this flag is theirs, and a much, much larger community of Uyghurs in China who have no say on the matter.