Language flags in menu and W3C

Hello. I would like to have the WPML language selector (only flags) in the menu.
To do that, I must insert the following code in the functions.php file.
It work fine but unfortunately there are 6 validation errors, that’s because the flags is added in “select…” “/select” tags.

Please, do you know if is possible to to avoid these problems?

This is the code that I put in the functions.php file:

// Filter wp_nav_menu() to add additional links and other output
function new_nav_menu_items($items) {
if (function_exists(‘icl_get_languages’)) {
$languages = icl_get_languages(‘skip_missing=0′);
if(1 < count($languages)){
foreach($languages as $l){
if(!$l){
$items = $items.’