The Unicode Consortium supersedes national flag emojis

Initially among the emojis, there were only 10 national flags to choose from, while today there are at will, however, the flag management policy is about to be changed by the Unicode Consortium. Through its blog, the association has announced that it will no longer accept proposals for new flags in the Unicode standard.

This does not mean that flags are disappearing or that there will never be any new ones added to the Unicode emoji set, as the subcategory of national flags is explicitly defined by the ISO 3166-1 standard and all the additions made by ISO to its list will be automatically added to the next Unicode update.

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National flag emojis are the least used

The consortium’s decision stems from a fact. Although national flags are the largest sub-category of the entire Unicode emoji set, national flags are in the last position in the ranking of the most used emojis of 2021.

Another problem is that thousands of subnational flags are not part of Unicode and adding all of them would double the amount of emojis. Finally, there are political issues, so it seems that evaluating the whole Unicode is completely withdrawing from the discussion.

While no further flagship proposals will be considered by the Unicode Consortium in the future, proposals for Unicode 16 will be accepted starting April 4.

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