What Emoji Flags Actually Represent and Where They Come From
Flag emojis are built from two-letter country codes, not stored images. Here is why some flags exist and others do not. Flag emojis look like a single image, but each one is built from two code points representing letters, and the letters are an abbreviation for a country. When I first learned this, it changed how I think about flag emojis entirely. They are not pictures of flags stored somewhere. They are instructions to the operating system to construct a flag from a two-letter code, and the system either knows the code or it does not. This is why flag emojis have strange gaps, why some flags render and others show as letters, and why the set of flag emojis has not grown much despite constant requests for new ones. I discovered this mechanism while debugging a bug where flag emojis were showing as letter pairs on some Android devices. The devices did not support flag rendering, so they fell back to showing the regional indicator letters. The user saw two letters instead of a flag and reported it as a bug. It was not a bug. It was the fallback behavior working as designed. Regional Indicator Symbols The mechanism is called regional indicator symbols. Unicode defines 26 special code points, U+1F1E6 through U+1F1FF, that correspond to the letters A through Z. These are not the same as regular letter characters. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.