One export. Smart detection. Country flags. Any locale. Zero dependencies.

Intl.DisplayNames already knows the name of every country, language, script, currency and calendar — in 200+ locales. anyaround makes it a one-liner and adds the one thing Intl leaves out: flags. No data files, no hardcoded flag maps, no config.

import { anyaround } from "anyaround";

anyaround("US");                            // "United States"  — smart mode (default)
anyaround("US", { display: "flag-name" });  // "🇺🇸 United States"
anyaround("US", { locale: "ru" });          // "Соединенные Штаты"
anyaround("en");                            // "English"
anyaround("Cyrl");                          // "Cyrillic"
anyaround("EUR");                           // "Euro"

install

npm install anyaround

usage

anyaround(code);
anyaround(code, options);

code is a region, language, script, currency or calendar code. In the default smart mode the kind is inferred from its shape.

anyaround.info() takes the same arguments and returns the structured record instead of a ready string — build your own output, or drive a <select>.

anyaround.info("US", { locale: "en" });
// { code: "US", type: "region", name: "United States", flag: "🇺🇸", found: true }

anyaround.info("QZ", { mode: "region" });
// { code: "QZ", type: "region", name: "QZ", flag: "🇶🇿", found: false }

flag is "" whenever the code is not a flag-bearing alpha-2 region. found is false when Intl had no name — name is then the code (fallback: "code", the default) or "", so you can tell a real hit from a miss.

recipes

Copy, paste, move on.

// Country picker with flags
countries.map((cc) => {
  const { code, name, flag } = anyaround.info(cc);
  return <option key={code} value={code}>{flag} {name}</option>;
});

// Language switcher, each language in its own tongue
anyaround("de", { mode: "language", locale: "de" });   // "Deutsch"
anyaround("ja", { mode: "language", locale: "ja" });   // "日本語"

// Profile location
anyaround(user.country, { display: "flag-name", locale: "en" });
// "🇩🇪 Germany"

// Currency label next to an amount
anyaround(order.currency, { mode: "currency", locale: "en" });
// "Euro"

// Flag only, for a compact table cell
anyaround(row.country, { display: "flag" });
// "🇺🇸"

Output is pure — no Date.now(), no environment reads — so server and client render identically. SSR-safe by construction.

modes

mode picks how the code is read. Default is "smart", which auto-detects:

| Shape | Detected as | Example | | --- | --- | --- | | three digits | region | "419" | | four letters | script | "Latn" | | two uppercase letters | region | "US" | | three uppercase letters | currency | "USD" | | anything else | language | "en", "zh-Hant" |

Case is the tiebreaker: "IT" is a region, "it" a language. Pin ambiguous codes with mode. calendar is never auto-detected.

anyaround("DE", { mode: "region", display: "flag-name" }); // "🇩🇪 Germany"
anyaround("en-US", { mode: "language" });                  // "American English"
anyaround("Cyrl", { mode: "script" });                     // "Cyrillic"
anyaround("EUR", { mode: "currency" });                    // "Euro"
anyaround("gregory", { mode: "calendar" });                // "Gregorian Calendar"

Region is the only mode that carries a flag. Flags are derived from the two-letter code via Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols — no image assets, no lookup table.

→ Every mode broken down

options

| Option | Type | Default | Used by | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | mode | "smart" \| "region" \| "language" \| "script" \| "currency" \| "calendar" | "smart" | — | | locale | string \| string[] | runtime locale | all | | style | "long" \| "short" \| "narrow" | "long" | all | | display | "name" \| "flag" \| "flag-name" \| "name-flag" | "name" | smart, region | | fallback | "code" \| "none" | "code" | all | | languageDisplay | "dialect" \| "standard" | "dialect" | language |

The options type is a discriminated union on mode — TypeScript only offers display in smart/region mode and languageDisplay in language mode.

→ What each option does, with examples

locales

Any valid BCP 47 tag, including regional variants and fallback arrays. When omitted, native Intl uses the runtime locale.

anyaround("US", { locale: "ru" });   // "Соединенные Штаты"
anyaround("US", { locale: "de" });   // "Vereinigte Staaten"
anyaround("US", { locale: "ja" });   // "アメリカ合衆国"
anyaround("US", { locale: ["sr-Latn-RS", "en"] });

vs the alternatives

| | anyaround | i18n-iso-countries | emoji-flags | world-countries | | --- | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | | bundled data | none (Intl) | ~1 file / locale | small | ~1MB JSON | | localized names | 200+ locales | bundled locales | no | no | | languages | yes | no | no | no | | scripts | yes | no | no | no | | currency names | yes | no | no | partial | | flags | yes | no | yes | emoji | | dependencies | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |

anyaround carries no country data at all — it borrows the ICU tables already in your runtime. Zero payload, but exact strings track the runtime's ICU version.

limitations

• No cities. Intl has no city display names. Regions and countries only.
• Names come from Intl and vary between ICU versions — don't snapshot them across environments.
• No reverse lookup. Code → name only.
• Flags are alpha-2 only, and derived from the code's shape rather than validated — any two-letter code yields a Regional-Indicator pair ("QZ" → 🇶🇿) even when found is false.

stability

anyaround follows semver. The public API is a single export — anyaround, with anyaround.info on it — plus AnyaroundOptions, AnyaroundInfo and the exported types. It only changes shape in a major release. Exact display strings come from Intl and may vary between ICU versions, so never assert on them across environments.

migrating from 1.x

2.0 removed the separate anyaroundInfo export. It is the same function, now reached through the one name the package exports:

- import { anyaround, anyaroundInfo } from "anyaround";
+ import { anyaround } from "anyaround";

- anyaroundInfo("US");
+ anyaround.info("US");

Arguments, return value and throwing behaviour are unchanged. Every any* package follows this shape from 2.0 on: the bare call does the job, everything else hangs off the same name.

compatibility

Node.js 18+ · Chrome 81+ · Firefox 86+ · Safari 14.1+ · Edge Runtime · Cloudflare Workers · Deno

Intl.DisplayNames is required (widely available since 2021). CI runs the full suite on Node 20, 22 and 24.

the any family

anyaround is part of any family — tiny, zero-dependency wrappers over native Intl, one API per package.

| | | | | --- | --- | --- | | anywhen | dates & relative time | Intl.DateTimeFormat | | anyamount | numbers, currency, units | Intl.NumberFormat | | anymany | lists | Intl.ListFormat | | anyaround | names & flags | Intl.DisplayNames | | anylong | durations | Intl.DurationFormat | | anyplural | plurals | Intl.PluralRules | | anyword | words & graphemes | Intl.Segmenter |

Want all of them? anyfamily is one install for the lot, and anyfamily-react wraps each as a hook with a shared locale provider.

npm install anyfamily

MIT © kirilinsky