🏳⭐💚 Esperanto language flag

[Crissov]

Unlike all natural languages, the constructed auxiliary language Esperanto (or its community) has an official flag. An Emoji Flag Sequence using RIS code points for its ISO 639 code EO is not a viable solution, because there may arise the need for ISO 3166-1 to register this code element for an actual region. An Emoji Tag Sequence may work, but as of Emoji 5.0 only subregion emoji flags are supported this way. An Emoji ZWJ Sequence would have better fallback anyway. Since the main feature of the flag is a green five-pointed star, I would suggest ⭐‍💚 or 🏳‍⭐‍💚.

Specific References

• https://github.com/Ranks/emojione/issues/263

Standard References

• Unicode Technical Standard 51 “Unicode Emoji” (beta)
• How to propose emojis to Unicode
• How to propose other additions or changes to Unicode (required form, email address: docsubmit＠unicode.org)
• Unicode document submission form

[Crissov]

• https://www.change.org/p/apple-add-esperanto-keyboard-and-flag-to-ios-keyboard-and-emoji

[Foorack]

Possible designs for Android and Twitter respectively. I did not create these designs. Credit goes to Eugenio Hansen. Images are released under CC BY-SA 4.0

[Foorack]

Any updates on this? What are the next steps to advance this proposal?

I think there are many people which would love seeing this implemented. Last few years the Esperanto Duolingo course for English and Spanish speakers have exploded with in total 1.5 million learners. There is also a course for Portuguese speakers in development. There are millions expected to have Esperanto as a second language and the amount of people learning it is growing. This should hopefully fulfill the "Expected usage level." criteria for submitting a proposal.

[Crissov]

I currently see no way a proposal would pass even the first step of the process established by the ESC of the UTC. They would have to decide whether a generic approach for ISO 639 language codes made sense despite most languages not having a visual identifier like this. If they decided against that they could consider recommending a ZWJ sequence, but this almost always only happens after a major vendor implements it first or supports it strongly in other ways. It would also constitute a precedent for many other flags that people would like to use, although arguably the Esperanto flag is more like the Rainbow flag and the Jolly Rogers, which both have ZWJ sequences now, than the many flags for geographic regions or ethnicities that people want encoded and are not covered by ISO 3166.

A proposal would probably have to stress that the green star flag does not represent the language itself but the community (like the Rainbow Flag does for LGBT). If this argument was accepted though, there would also be no valid reason left to oppose flags for political movements like communism. The UTC has received a well-formed proposal for a Transgender Flag and as far as I know has not yet settled on a decision or at least has not published it. Such feedback would be helpful in deciding whether and how to advance this.

Does the Esperanto community already use an emoji or a sequence of emojis for representation?

[bouncepaw]

Many esperatists tend to use green emojis to represent Esperanto. For example, the largest Esperanto group in Telegram uses 4-leaf clover. Green heart is quite popular too.

[Mbodin]

Well, it largely depends on what possibilities of the website offers. A lot of people use the hashtags “#eo” or “#EO” and its varieties. The regional indicator 🇪🇴 (for EO) is also used by people who can type them. In a lot of places, a custom emoji is used (see for instance in: https://aleph.land/@MartinShadok/99389526417488152 ). Image replacements for emojis are sometimes used when custom emojis are not available. Green emojis are also used, but they usually are much more ambiguous than wanted.

Given the messy usages of this family of emojis, I believe that adding it to Unicode would actually help, even if this means accepting more emojis than expected.

[Mbodin]

I forgot to mention the five-pointed star, which is also very common, especially if the medium enables to change text color (to green, in this case). The symbol EЭ is also used ( https://eo.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilea_simbolo ), but not that much in my personnal experience.

[JonathanReeve]

Just to add a quick note here, in support of this proposal: Esperantists already use this emoji (created as a custom emoji) here on Mastodon: https://esperanto.masto.host/. It would be great if this were official and usable everywhere.

[redyoshi49q]

Issue #413 describes this emoji proposal as being added to the larger emoji set of "Flags". What are the practical implications of this determination? It doesn't appear to be a rejection, but there also doesn't appear to be an introduction of an Esperanto flag emoji in light of this proposal. What does an emoji being added to a larger set mean with regards to that emoji's adoption?

[Liggliluff]

May I suggest the use of 🟩 to mark the colour instead. According to Unicodes Emoji Design Guidelines # Colors, the large coloured squares can be used to define a colour of an emoji. The list defines 🐈‍⬛ as a black cat. Therefore a green star flag 🏳‍⭐‍🟩 or a green flag with star 🏳🟩‍⭐ would work better with the standard.

[Crissov]

Yes, that is a recent addition which can be used that way.

[jakubfabijan]

Does anything changed in this topic?

[Crissov]

No, there hasn't been any progress.

[Mbodin]

Would the addition of tag sequences for flags help with this proposal? http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Sample_Valid_Emoji_Tag_Sequences As the language is not meant to be associated to a particular place, the regional indicator should probably be ZZ, it would look a sequence like 🏴zzeo✦ (U+1F3F4 U+E007A U+E007A U+E0065 U+E0061 U+E007F). Would that made sense?

[Crissov]

Nothing has changed from what I wrote initially:

An Emoji Tag Sequence may work, but as of Emoji 5.0 only subregion emoji flags are supported this way.

Esperanto is a language and not a geographic region. 🤷

[Mbodin]

Oops, indeed, I forgot that you already referred to the tag sequences. Sorry about that.

[Liggliluff]

A proposal to Unicode could be made to have flags of laguages supported. This would allow flags for other languages such as Lojban, Sami, Ido and more.

Using the ISO 639 language code is ideal, and there's also the language tag character E00001. So Esperanto could be: 🏴Ⓛeo✦ where Ⓛ is the language tag character.

[Crissov]

Openmoji has an Esperanto flag as U+1F3F3+FE0F+200D+1F7E9+200D+2B50+200D+1F7E9 : 🏳️‍🟩‍⭐‍🟩.

[Liggliluff]

If the Esperanto flag is implemented in multiple emoji sets, we're likely to see requests for more language flags like Lojban (arguably a logo), and Ido. To implement these in a similar fashion, would that be 🏳⭕⭕🟦↕️↔️🟥 (flag-circle-circle-blue-arrow-arrow-red) and 🏳🟦🔻⭐⬜ (flag-blue-triangle-star-white)? I suspect it'll quickly become a mess.

So what about writing up a formal proposal to Unicode? We have to start somewhere. My suggestion is still using the subdivision flag sequence, but by adding the language tag character (U+E00001) and using ISO 639-1 and 639-3. We can also suggest other implementations as well, but I still strongly believe in using ISO 639 since that would weed out the less serious conlangs. After all, we don't want to see every conlang from the conlang wikia showing up. But instead well known ones as Esperanto, Lojban, Ido, but also Interlingue, Kotava, Lingua Franca Nova and Novial would be valid for implementation.

Another benefit is that languages associated with just a group of people, who has their own flag, but not a flag of a region, would have the opportunity to have their flag available. Such as the Sami flag (usually used for Northern Sami), but however not the Australian Aboriginal flag, since it doesn't represent one language.

[Crissov]

Unlike geographical regions and tribes or peoples, languages rarely have flags. You could actually argue that languages never have flags but their speaker communities may. There is no ISO alphanumeric code for cultural groups, but maybe there should be – perhaps as an extension to the spatial area codes of ISO 3166.

[Liggliluff]

@Crissov while you are right that most languages don't have flags, and when flag are used, it's commonly the flag of the nation the language is named after (except for English, Spanish and Portuguese). But for when languages do have flags, which is still a few (a few more if you include logos), having a consistent standard for all these is something I still recommended.

Searching on Google, and there doesn't seem to be any ISO code standard for ethnicities (I'm not surprised), but there exists some code standard for some counties. So maybe an ISO standard should exist for this? Or perhaps not.

But sure, languages are too limited to cover all forms of tribes and groups of people. Such as Finland-Swedes, which has a red flag with a yellow cross. This would require both a language code and a country code, and there's no country tag character, but there is hyphen-minus, so ⚑Ⓛsv-fi✦ is possible, but at this point it might actually just be better to "describe" it using shapes: 🏳🟥✝️🟨 (flag-red-cross-yellow).

Maybe a request for flag building blocks could be made instead. Such as "canton" and "emblem", so the Esperanto flag is "flag-green-[canton]-white-[emblem]-star-green", and also for what shape the background is, so for Lingua Franca Nova it is "flag-[bottom_left_spread]-blue-green-yellow-orange-red". You could then also use this for other LGBT+ flags, like the bisexual flag which can be "flag-[horizontal_bands]-pink-pink-purple-blue-blue" (repeated to give it the 2:1:2 shape it has). This would even allow the Australian Aboriginal flag to be made as well by doing "flag-[horizontal_bands]-black-red-[emblem]-dot-yellow".

[Crissov]

Whatsapp is currently laying out cow paths which may be paved later on. 🏳️‍🟧‍⬛‍🟧 https://blog.emojipedia.org/whatsapps-new-refugee-nation-flag/

[Liggliluff]

Yes, maybe horizontal bars should be assumed. Using the white flag followed by squares does make sense. The refugee nation flag has weird proportions; about 5:1:2, but more accurately as 63:13:24. But I still think it's good to incorporate the proportions in the sequence. There are flags where the proportions matter: Tatarstan and North Rhine-Westphalia - although these two specifically do have subdivision codes, my point still remains about other flags. There's no other red-black-red striped flag that I can find, but one might be made in the future.

So having "flag-red-red-red-red-red-black-red-red" is one idea, alternatively "flag-red-5-black-red-2", since digits are valid emojis too as far as I'm aware (I don't mean the keycaps).

Just trying to think up ideas to future-proof any system.

[Mbodin]

I don’t know how much it could help on settling a good format, but it might be related. The French language has a (not well-known) flag for its community: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Flag_of_La_Francophonie.svg Depending on the article language, it’s not clear in Wikipedia whether this flag is the flag of the corresponding international organisation (in which case I’m out of scope, sorry) or of the French-speaking community. In any case, it’s quite different from the French flag, so it might be an example where 🏴Ⓛfra✦ (if it’s the format that is chosen) would be different from the flag of the nation the language is named after.

I like the idea of basing the proposal on ISO 639, even though it would not always be applicable. Would it be an issue to only have a partial specification? Like saying that this only applies to languages with a flag?

[Liggliluff]

@Mbodin I would suggest it being just 🏴Ⓛfr✦, saves one character (4 bytes in UTF-8). Having that as the flag of French, would allow people to choose between it and the flag of France. That flag seems to represent French speakers as a whole, and is as far as I can see the most optimal flag of French. As said, people can still pick whichever they prefer to use.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by partial specification; but if this idea was to be implemented, it would only be used for language codes that do have flags (aformentioned conlang flags) and could also be for languages closely tied with a group of people who have a flag (like Sami 🏴Ⓛsmi✦ and Romani 🏴Ⓛrom✦). But wouldn't be used for most languages such as English, Spanish, German (unless there's an actual flag that isn't the national flag?). It's similar to how the subdivision flag standard was made for all ISO 3166-2 codes, even though some regions don't have flags, so a lot of valid emoji codes will go unused. It would only be used if there's a flag. One could argue this is the flag of English which often is used (but I'd argue 🏴gbeng✦ should be used instead).

[ebanDev]

Hey, any news ?

[easyteacher]

+1

[armandokun]

+1

[lucianlorens]

+1

[victorbnl]

+1

[victorbnl]

The issue isn't solved, is it?

[Crissov]

Unicode does not accept flag emoji proposals anymore, so the issue is resolved as Won’t Fix.

[victorbnl]

Oh, okay, sad

[redyoshi49q]

http://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag-emoji.html <- This is a blog post on the subject of Unicode no longer accepting flag proposals, for context.

Thanks for the update, Crissov. While this clearly wasn't the result this issue thread's participants desired, the closure is nevertheless appreciated.

[happysmash27]

I think the issue with having tons and tons of flag emoji could be largely fixed by having a couple analogues to the Unicode regional indicator symbols that can represent things with a defined code. This same system could be used for language symbols, company logos, cryptocurrency symbols (there is one for Bitcoin but no other cryptocurrencies) and more while requiring only 26 symbols per category. it could be reduced even further by just having a single symbol for which category it is in and then latin letters (or some special symbol like the regional indicators) for whichever indicator it has.

The Esperanto flag would be extremely useful for representing language selection, and this same proposal could be used for every other language with an ISO code as well, and more. Unicode doesn't even need to recommend any single language flag. Just having the option to implement it in fonts would help immensely.

Would anyone be interested in creating some competing standard that uses the Unicode Private Use Area to make something like this? I think it could be very useful for creating symbols not just for languages, but for a lot of other things as well.

[Liggliluff]

@happysmash27 This is what I suggested above. Use the method created by making subdivision flags, but after the black flag, you insert the language tag character, followed by the shortest ISO 639 code for the language. Esperanto will be 🏴Ⓛeo✦ (black flag, language tag, e tag, o tag, cancel tag).

If a language and a group of people are closely tied together, one way could be to represent this group of people by the language flag. For example 🏴Ⓛsmi✦ for the Sami people and language flag, and 🏴Ⓛnv✦ for the Navajo Nation flag. But it isn't necessary to use the language flag if a subdivision flag is already available, for example 🏴iqkr✦ for the flag of the Kurdistan region in Iraq is commonly used to represent the Kurds, so it isn't necessary to create an emoji for 🏴Ⓛku✦ (Kurdish), even if the emoji sequence is still valid.

Since there isn't any standard for etnicitets, using languages to represent etnicitets unless a subdivision is already available, is the best we can do, I think. This is such a simple method that we don't even need to use private use characters.

Company logos and cryptocurrencies is a bit trickier to implement. There's no real standard for what codes you would use, since there are companies with the same names, and there's plenty of cryptocurrencies. But having different emojis for official national currency symbols isn't a bad idea, and we can continue with the tag system. 💲 is the only sole emoji currency symbol, so write 💲eur✦ for €, 💲gbp✦ for £, 💲pln✦ for zł, and so on. You could then expand this to cryptocurrencies by writing 💲ethereum✦ for example, since it wouldn't be valid to write 💲eth✦, since that is a currency code for Ethiopia. But cryptocurrency names aren't official anywhere, so it isn't as robust as using ISO 4217 for national currencies. For companies, the best I got so far is the Stock Ticker Symbols, but that would only cover stock companies.

But the issue with company logos and some cryptocurrency logos, is that they are copyrighted, and there are restrictions on how they can be implemented. That's why at least supporting the national currency symbols would work, since those are usually free to use however you want (Poland doesn't own the letter sequence "zł" for example).

[Cityloue15]

hello a new proposal to unicode is this planned?