Sark could be getting its own emoji flag

The tiny democracy’s flag is one of eight new draft symbols making up update Emoji 16.0 unveiled for World Emoji Day, today.

However, Alderney, with four times the population, is still without official emoji recognition.

Speaker of Sark Chief Pleas, Paul Armorgie, said that on behalf of the Sark government he was absolutely delighted to hear the news.

‘For a small jurisdiction to have its own emoji is a cracking bit of PR for Sark,’ he said.

‘We love being part of the Bailiwick, but anything we can do to push our own identity is a small, but important, step.’

Mr Armorgie added that he had heard rumours of the flag’s inclusion on social media back in March.

‘I thought it might be a wind up, and in truth I’d forgotten all about it,’ he said.

‘This falls into Sark’s position to have a greater online presence, we already have our own top level domain, ‘.cq’, officially recognised by the UN, which we hope to take advantage of both commercially and as a government.’

Chief Pleas has recently appointed a new special committee for its ‘online identity’ to promote and manage its web presence.

Along with the Sark flag, the list includes a smiley face with bags under its eyes, a paint splatter, a harp and a human fingerprint. Assuming all eight are approved, Emoji 16.0 will bring the total number of emojis that are widely supported across multiple platforms to 3,790. Even for those who follow emoji news closely the inclusion of the Sark flag has come as a surprise.

This is because back in March 2022 Unicode – the organisation that maintains the text encoding standard used across platforms – announced that it would no longer be accepting proposals for ‘flag emoji’ in any category.

However, Sark found itself automatically added as the Unicode Consortium uses a list known as ‘ISO 3166-1 alpha 2’ as the source for valid country designation’s – a list Sark was added to in 2020 at the request of the UK.

This is the first time a new national or regional flag emoji has been added through this automatic recommendation mechanism since emoji flags were first formally approved in the first list ‘Emoji 1.0’ back in 2015.

This is why Alderney, and even larger jurisdictions like Northern Ireland, do not have emoji recognition.

National newspapers have picked up on the story, many including detail on Sark, bringing the added attention Chief Pleas hoped for.

But Sarkees and devotees should not get too excited yet, as the list still needs official approval.

This should be rubber-stamped on 10 September, with the new flag symbol available in the autumn.

The red cross flag, with two yellow lions, was first designed in 1938 as a flag for the seigneur. In 1987 it was used to represent Sark in the Island Games and it became the de facto flag of Sark.