Regional flags Emoji might soon be a thing

The Unicode Consortium, which is the governing body behind what Emoji get to see the light of day, has just announced a proposed new update for the next version of Unicode and the upcoming Emoji 5.0. If the proposed update goes through to the official version of Unicode, we will get to see regional flag Emoji appear on different platforms.

In case you're not exactly sure what we're talking about here, you can check out our full dummy guide on how Emoji work.

Said regional flags include countries that are part of the United Kingdom, such as Scotland and England, as well as states of the US. So, we could be seeing a California flag Emoji soon. However, different vendors won't be forced to support these new Emoji if they are approved. This means that not all platforms that run that version of Unicode will necessarily support regional flags Emoji and there might be differences between the level of support offered by Apple and Google, for example.

The proposed update will be up for public review until January 16, 2017. It is not yet known when the new version of Unicode will be released, but it's believed it will be in the beginning of next year.