Why there is no Northern Ireland flag next to the other three
๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ England, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ Scotland and ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ Wales arrived in 2017 as tag sequences: a black flag followed by invisible letters spelling gbeng, gbsct or gbwls. The same system could spell gbnir, but no such flag has been approved, and Northern Ireland's last official flag lost that status in 1973. Our 2026-10-18 check found no artwork for gbnir in Apple's, Google's, Twemoji's or OpenMoji's set. Phones that do not support the three British flags at all fall back to a plain ๐ด, so if a Scotland flag arrives black, the sender's device was fine and yours is out of date.
Nordic and French flags that are the same picture
Several European codes point at territories that fly someone else's flag, and the emoji sets draw them as exact copies. In our 2026-10-18 comparison ๐ธ๐ฏ Svalbard & Jan Mayen was identical to ๐ณ๐ด Norway in all four sets, and Apple and Google also reuse it for ๐ง๐ป Bouvet Island. ๐ซ๐ท France appears three times: as itself, as ๐ฒ๐ซ St. Martin and as ๐จ๐ต Clipperton Island. OpenMoji adds two copies the others avoid: its ๐ฒ๐จ Monaco is the same image as ๐ฎ๐ฉ Indonesia, and its ๐ท๐ด Romania matches ๐น๐ฉ Chad. Both pairs really are near twins; Monaco's flag is just a slightly different shape from Indonesia's.
UK, GB and the codes that are not what you would guess
The United Kingdom's flag is ๐ฌ๐ง, spelled G plus B, because GB is its ISO code. Typing the regional letters U and K gives you two letters and no flag, since UK is only reserved, not assigned. ๐ช๐บ works on the same reserved basis, and ๐ฝ๐ฐ Kosovo uses XK, a code ISO set aside for private use that the European Commission adopted for Kosovo. Greece is GR, not GK, Switzerland is CH from its Latin name, and Germany is DE from Deutschland. For Eurovision and Euros posts, those three are the codes people most often type wrongly when building flags by hand.
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