HOW TO RETURN THE FLAGS TO THE MAC’S KEYBOARD MENU
For decades, Apple relied on a country flag as the primary indicator of which keyboard layout you’d selected in macOS for languages associated with a single country. In the last several versions of macOS, you select keyboards in System Preferences → Keyboards → Input Sources by clicking the plus sign (+) and browsing or searching for the layout you need.
The flags helped some of us recognize and confirm the layout we wanted when multiple choices for a language were available, such as a French layout used in France versus a French layout used in Canada. Many entries, such as Arabic, used letters or logograms as their symbol when no single country association made sense.
In macOS 12.4 Monterey, Apple took down the flags and put up the more boring—but perhaps more neutral and readable—two-letter international country codes in places where it previously used flags. Now all entries in Input Sources have letters,
