Country Emoji Flags 🚩

We need to talk about country emoji flags. If you take a good look at the abundance of emojis on my website, and the topics I like to write about, my obsession with them probably won't surprise you. I love emojis and I love travelling, hence I love country emoji flags.

For the past one and a half years, I was convinced that using country emoji flags as blog post tags for my fancy travel blog was a neat idea. This allows my users to filter blog posts by country with the added benefit of displaying the respective country's flag in the best imaginable style: emoji-style. Neat! So neat indeed!

But then, on one not-so-sunny day, for reasons I cannot remember, I left my insular Firefox world, where everything seemed to be in order and opened my website in Chrome. Suddenly my neat idea didn't appear to be so neat after all.

The colourful flags of my visited countries disappeared to make room for ugly, lifeless two-letters country codes.

What the...?

What the bloody hell?

First of all, and most importantly, why has no one, in all this time, told me about this? Mum? Dad? Auntie? Anyone? I know, you've been busy. But I also know that you have been reading along and could have just reached out:

Boy! Something seems off. What's with these strange country codes showing up in your tags list?

— Imaginary email that no one bothered to write me

Second of all, what actually happened here? To begin with, this is an issue that only affects Windows. Windows uses its own Segoe UI Emoji Font Family to display emojis. As it turns out, the font doesn't support displaying any country emoji flags. In fact, Microsoft as an emoji vendor altogether doesn't provide any designs for country flags. If you ever wondered why you won't find any flags in Window's native emoji panel or on Microsoft Teams it's because Microsoft never implemented them.

Third of all, why? Why won't you let us have country emoji flags, Microsoft? Well, we can only speculate.

But I can take away that this probably has a political background. In the same way that Apple blocks the Taiwanese emoji flag within China, Microsoft apparently wants to stay away from the geo-political minefield that is the world we currently live in.

But I really want country emoji flags!

Then you should have them!

One obvious fix is to force all of your users to just stick to using Firefox. Why? Because instead of using Segoe UI, Mozilla uses Twitter's Twemoji font on Windows platforms to properly display country emoji flags, just the way god (or in this case: Unicode) intended.

If force is not an option, there is always this sweet Country Flag Emoji Polyfill, which I have now implemented on my travel blog that follows a similar approach: if your platform doesn't support country emoji flags, it downloads a subset of the Twemoji font into the user's browser and thus, again, enabling them to see those beautiful flags.

Last but not least: use a custom library of flag images (such as Flagpedia), where you won't ever run into encoding problems.

Country Emoji Flags for Everyone!

The influence of geo-politics on our digital world isn't a new development. This topic reminded me of the fate of the .io top level domain.

The United Kingdom is currently in negotiations with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of one of their overseas territories in the Indian Ocean: The Chagos Archipelago, aka the "British Indian Ocean Territory" which holds the .io domain. The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which governs internet domains, has a well-documented procedure, once a country or territory ceases to exist: its respective domain gets deleted. So look out, all you cool tech start-ups with your cool .io domains! By the way, guess what country holds the .ai domain, which had an obvious increase in use in recent years? Exactly, yet another British Overseas Territory: a little island nation in the Caribbean called Anguilla.

Just like with domain names, there is a formalized procedure that describes the introduction and removal of country emoji flags. Unicode, which governs emojis, uses the internationally recognized list of countries and territories (ISO 3166-1) to maintain country emoji flags. The most recent addition to this list marks the island of Sark, which is a (yet again) "British Crown Dependency" in the English Channel and apparently now qualifies to make it to said list.

Therefore, with the release of Unicode 16, Sark did get its own flag emoji and the territory is in the process of getting its own top level domain (.cq) too. Go Sark! The island is tiny (5,44 km2 / 2.1 square miles), is a dark-sky preserve and apparently, to quote Wikipedia, "one of the few remaining places in the world where cars are banned from roads and only tractors, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles are allowed". Shit, I really want to visit Sark now.

Altogether, we can say that Microsoft really has no reason to bother excluding our beloved country emoji flags from their emoji implementation.

Enough said.