Georeactor Blog

A month ago in Where do flag Emoji and TLDs come from?, I explained the unique situation for the small island of Sark. It's a British Crown Dependency like Isle of Man, Jersey, and its neighbor Guernsey, so the ISO agreed to allot a two-letter country code in 2020. This means they likely qualify for a flag emoji and a ccTLD. But first, we have to prod the system a bit. I sent an email to the Unicode lists, and before that blog post, there was already a ticket in the Unicode CLDR issue tracker.

I was a little concerned on January 30th when Dr. Mark Davis, Unicode co-founder, wrote:

I think this is not yet in bcp47…

What is that?
According to Wikipedia, we're talking about a language tag, such as "en-CQ" for Sark. Not something that people are likely to use, but I guess it could be there if they have en-GG for Guernsey?

What I didn't know, was the Unicode Technical Committee had already met. On Febuary 8th, I received a response reading in part:

At the recent UTC meeting, I was directed to thank you for your feedback on PRI #471, and direct you to the comments from the Emoji Subcommittee in document L2/23-010R, section 2.1.

Opening the Unicode Technical Committee report of the meeting, I jumped ahead to section 2.1:

Emoji flags are subject to CLDR assigning the appropriate idStatus for a region subtag

Thank the correspondent for their feedback [...] in PRI #471, and relay the ESC response in Section 2.1 of document L2/23-010.

The content of this section is mostly the original request and their plan to send me a link telling me about this report, so it feels a bit meta!

Shortly after, the Jira ticket's priority switched to "MAJOR", and a person and a fix version were assigned. So now more than ever, I think that we will see a Flag of Sark emoji on devices and fonts.

But when? Unicode 15.0 was approved in September 2022 and is still coming to devices. My e-mail got filed into v15.1, which is open for feedback until April. To be clear, this is NOT a new codepoint, it is just setup to alert devs that 🇨+🇶 is a valid flag.
I don't know how this all affects a timeline. If Unicode makes an announcement or post, maybe vendors and typographers will see 🇨 🇶 is reserved and just add it along with the moose and other new emojis from 15.0, but I have no idea!