Regional Indicator Symbol
The regional indicator symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic Unicode characters (AโZ) intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment.
These were defined as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags.[1][2] The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded.[3]
They are encoded in the range U+1F1E6 ๐ฆ regional indicator symbol letter a (HTML 🇦) to U+1F1FF ๐ฟ regional indicator symbol letter z (HTML 🇿) within the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.[4]
Emoji flag sequences
A pair of regional indicator symbols is referred to as an emoji flag sequence (although it represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region).[5]
Out of the 676 possible pairs of regional indicator symbols (26 ร 26), only 270 are considered valid Unicode region codes. These are a subset of the region sequences in the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR):[5][6][7]
- All 256 regular region sequences in the CLDR
- Two of the 34 macroregion sequences in the CLDR (EU and UN)
- All 12 deprecated region sequences in the CLDR (strongly discouraged - intended for backward compatibility only)
A separate mechanism (emoji tag sequences) is used for regional flags, such as Scotland or California[11] It uses U+1F3F4 ๐ด WAVING BLACK FLAG and formatting tag characters instead of regional indicator symbols.
Font test
This is a demonstration of how these characters appear in your browser individually: ๐ฆ ๐ง ๐จ ๐ฉ ๐ช ๐ซ ๐ฌ ๐ญ ๐ฎ ๐ฏ ๐ฐ ๐ฑ ๐ฒ ๐ณ ๐ด ๐ต ๐ถ ๐ท ๐ธ ๐น ๐บ ๐ป ๐ผ ๐ฝ ๐พ ๐ฟ.
Following is a demonstration of sample letter pairs in a variety of fonts:
Unicode Block
| Regional indicator symbols subset of Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement[1] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| ... | (U+1F100โU+1F1E5 omitted) | |||||||||||||||
| U+1F1Ex | ๐ฆ | ๐ง | ๐จ | ๐ฉ | ๐ช | ๐ซ | ๐ฌ | ๐ญ | ๐ฎ | ๐ฏ | ||||||
| U+1F1Fx | ๐ฐ | ๐ฑ | ๐ฒ | ๐ณ | ๐ด | ๐ต | ๐ถ | ๐ท | ๐ธ | ๐น | ๐บ | ๐ป | ๐ผ | ๐ฝ | ๐พ | ๐ฟ |
Notes
| ||||||||||||||||
Background
In 2007 a draft proposal was presented to the Unicode Technical Committee to encode emoji symbols, specifically those in widespread use on mobile phones by Japanese telecommunications companies DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank.[12] The proposed symbols included ten national flags:[13] China (๐จ๐ณ), Germany (๐ฉ๐ช), Spain (๐ช๐ธ), France (๐ซ๐ท), the UK (๐ฌ๐ง), Italy (๐ฎ๐น), Japan (๐ฏ๐ต), South Korea (๐ฐ๐ท), Russia (๐ท๐บ), and the United States (๐บ๐ธ). Encoding these flags but not other countries' flags was considered, by some, as prejudicial.[14] One rejected solution was to encode the ten flags but call them "EMOJI COMPATIBILITY SYMBOL-n" and represent them visually in the Standard as "EC n" instead of showing the flags they represent.[15] Another rejected solution would have allocated 676 codepoints (26 x 26) for each possible two letter combination of AโZ. They would represent political entities based on ISO 3166 such as "FR" for France or Internet ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) such as "EU" for the European Union.[16]
The accepted solution was to add 26 characters for letters used for the representation of regional indicators, which used in pairs would represent the ten national flags and possible future extensions.[2] Per the Unicode Standard "the main purpose of such [regional indicator symbol] pairs is to provide unambiguous roundtrip mappings to certain characters used in the emoji core sets"[17] specifically the ten national flags:[18] ๐จ๐ณ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐ธ, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ฐ๐ท, ๐ท๐บ, and ๐บ๐ธ.
References
- โ Andrew West. "What's new in Unicode 6.0". Babelstone. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- 1 2 Michael Everson and Ken Whistler. "N3727: Proposal to encode Regional Indicator Symbols in the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ "Unicode FAQ: Emoji and Dingbats". The Unicode Consortium. 2009-10-28. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ "Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement, Range 1F100 - 1F1FF, The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0" (PDF). Unicode Consortium. 2010. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- 1 2 "UTR #51: Unicode Emoji, Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences". Unicode Consortium. 2017-05-18.
- โ "UTR #35: Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML), Validity Data". Unicode Consortium.
- โ "CLDR v30.0 Region Validity Data". Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). 2016-10-17.
- โ "UCD: Emoji Sequence Data for UTR #51". Unicode Consortium. 2017-03-27.
- โ "UTR #35: Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML), Supplemental Metadata". Unicode Consortium.
- โ "CLDR v30.0 Supplemental Metadata". Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). 2016-10-17.
- โ "UTR #51: Unicode Emoji". Unicode Consortium. 2017-05-18.
- โ Momoi, Kat; Davis, Mark; Scherer, Markus (2007-08-03). "L2/07-257: Working Draft Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols". Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ "Unicode Mapping for Emoji with Reference to Japanese Carriers, AU/KDDI, DoCoMo, and Softbank" (ZIP archive file format). Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ "L2/09-114 N3607: Towards an encoding of symbol characters used as emoji" (PDF). 2009-04-06. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ "INCITS/L2/09-304: Comments accompanying the U.S. negative vote on PDAM 8 to ISO/IEC 10646:2003 (SC2 N4078)" (PDF). 2009-08-15. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ Pentzlin, Karl (2008-08-09). "L2/08-305: Some suggestions about the encoding of national flags as requested by the Emoji proposal" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-08-18.
- โ The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2, Chapter 15: Symbols (PDF). Unicode, Inc. September 2012. p. 534. ISBN 978-1-936213-07-8.
- โ "Emoji Sources" (plain text). Unicode, Inc. 2013-12-17. Retrieved 2014-08-18.