Unicode’s latest Emoji 16.0 submission is scheduled to open starting April 4th, 2022, though what’s different this time is that Unicode has decided that it won’t entertain any new flag emoji submissions. For reference, flags are the largest category of emojis, with 200 out of the total 3,600 emojis being flags.
According to the Consortium, the addition of a country’s flag creates exclusivity at the expense of others. Adding a regional flag in favour of a different region’s flag might come off as a biased decision on the Consortium’s part.
The Past and Future of #Flag #Emoji https://t.co/sYjYVbIFuL pic.twitter.com/a1l6NIGRKl
— The Unicode Consortium (@unicode) March 28, 2022
Regions within the UK like England, Scotland and Wales have their flags represented as emojis in the Unicode standard, whereas several other subnation flags, like Northern Ireland aren’t.
“The inclusion of new flags will always continue to emphasize the exclusion of others. And there isn’t much room for the fluid nature of politics — countries change but Unicode additions are forever — once a character is added it can never be removed,” reads Unicode’s blog post.
This doesn’t mean that the current flag emojis are set to disappear, though countries that don’t have their flags added to the Unicode standard now won’t have a chance to have their nation represented. The only exception for the addition of a new flag is if a new nation is recognized by the United Nations, in which case, its flag emoji will automatically be added to the next Unicode update.
In addition to the issue of exclusivity at the expense of others, the Consortium says that flags are “by far” the least used emojis, with the exception of the rainbow flag ????????, so there’s no point flooding the emojis list with flags that people rarely ever use.
Read more about the ‘past and future of flag emojis’ here.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: Unicode
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