Georeactor Blog

It's been two weeks since my Flag of Sark Emoji - The High Council post, and Unicode ⚙️⚙️⚙️ keep on turning.

Two pull requests were merged to place Sark into the CLDR regions (though it's added to a list of exceptions which don't need to be translated into every language).

A contributor found Sercquaiais, the traditional language of Sark. Today it has a few speakers, and no ISO code, so it wasn't part of region-language updates.

I looked into when being added to the CLDR repo translates into being in a CLDR release. CLDR's v43 public beta is next month, followed by a release date in April. I don't have any idea how this affects the emoji timeline, but it certainly helps.

Not the smallest

The absurdity of 500 Sark residents getting a flag emoji led me to research other flags which I didn't know about.

• I've previously mentioned Bouvet Island, an uninhabited Antarctic island. Fonts typically map 🇧 + 🇻 to the Norwegian flag.

• The CLDR team mentioned the Canary Islands, which I didn't know had an ISO code and flag 🇮🇨

• What about regions more like Sark, with a small, non-zero population and a distinct flag? After reviewing the list, South Georgia / South Sandwich 🇬🇸 have 16–32 residents, the Pitcairn Islands have 🇵🇳 for 47 people, and Tristan da Cunha 🇹🇦 has a population of 250 (they're neighbors with Ascension Island and St. Helena, which also got flags).

Bougainville

You might wonder when the next new country code might come along. In 2019, a vote in Bougainville showed overwhelming support for independence from Papua New Guinea. There appears to be an agreement from PNG for an official independence vote by 2027. Maybe their code will be BU?

Martinique adopts new flag

I learned from /r/vexillology that Martinique adopted a new flag. The previous 'snake flag' was rarely used or seen in Martinique and is associated with the slave trade.

I'm hopeful that emoji font typographers will include this in Unicode 15.0 / 15.1 updates!