The latest Unicode version 16.0 is open for submissions from April 4, 2022, through July 31. If you want to create your own emoji and use it on your devices, now is the best time!

You need to make a form for your emoji proposals and send it to Unicode Consortium. The submission details can refer to our former blog post: 🐣How To Make A New Emoji?

However, it has been a while since the last related blog post, there is a big decision about flag emojis submission that you may be interested in.

Some information updates about Flag Emoji Submission

Based on the blog post of Jennifer Daniel (Emoji Subcommittee chairperson), flag emoji have great challenges due to their open-ended nature, infrequent use, and burden on implementations. So, Unicode Consortium decided there would no longer accept proposals for flags in the future.

However, this is divided into 2 cases: geographical flags and non-geographical flags (such as pride flags, language flags, etc.)

  • Geographical flags: Though 'Flags' is now the largest category, it's not used much, and the usage of the country flag and subdivision flag is even less so.
  • If you want to submit a new geographical flag, it is not impossible but extremely difficult. This kind of flag emoji submission needs to be considered from many angles to avoid looking like favoritism to a specific region. To get more information about country flag emojis, you can refer to our blog post to get more information about country flag emojis: 🚩Why Country Flag Emojis Only Show Two-Letter Codes On Windows?

  • Non-geographical flags: Like pride flags, color-based flags, Olympic flag, language flags, etc. The Unicode Consortium's decision to no longer add this kind of new flag emoji.
  • However, this maybe seems unfair. Why there be a rainbow flag, transgender flag, but now cannot submit new flags? What if there are identity groups that need their flags in the future? Not only pride flags, what if there are other flag emojis needs in the future?

    🖼️ credit: Wikipedia - Pride flag

    No worry, the Unicode Consortium of course considered this situation! Instead of submitting new flag emojis, they recommend using heart emojis❤️ to indicate a specific flag. For example, genderqueer pride flag 💜🤍💚, nonbinary pride flag 💛🤍💜🖤; There are some people already found the 'real' usage of heart emojis, using color hearts combination to represent country.

    What's more, there will be more new heart emoji colors in the future, which they believe can satisfy the needs for flag color variations to some extent.

    🔺There are already 3 new colored heart emojis that will be added in Unicode 15.0.

Summary

Anyway, you cannot submit a new flag emoji unless the Unicode is open for application. However, it is still the best time to submit your own non-flag emoji idea💡!

But it should be reminded that when making a new emoji, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC) need to take lots of aspects into consideration, such as usage frequency, trade-offs with other choices, font file size, the burden on developers/users, etc., so it is impossible to make anything emojified🚫, even need to reduce the number of emoji they encode in any given year. This means you should choose your idea carefully to increase the possibility of acceptance.

We may also try to submit some emojis in the future🙋‍. If you have any wonderful thoughts, leave your comment below💭👇, and maybe the next version update will have your emoji!

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