Country flags emoji in Windows fonts

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National flags in Windows fonts

Context

This gist contains a copy of my comment to a Medium article named Designing in the Open(Source) published by Microsoft Design (official account).

The article is about Fluent Emoji -- a collection of emoji from Microsoft. They are kind of a big deal because they are included with every copy of Windows operating system as a Segoe UI Emoji font.

I very much like the aestetics of some of those emojis but there is something about this font which strikes me as illogical, impractical, and just plain wrong -- the font does not include any national flags.

So, imagine your iPhone emoji keyboard without the country flags. WTF, right?! 😈 This is what Windows users have to live with.

It appears that the reason for not including the national flags into the emoji font distributed with Windows was a (well-intentioned) desire to avoid offending some people (read: governments) who believe that a certain national flag (read: the country and its people) should not exist. International recognition of nation states is a somewhat sensitive subject. So at some point someone at Microsoft decided to sidestep the politics of it by not including any national flags at all!

The consequences of that decision still cause daily frustration to great many Windows users. I think there is no good reason why it should continue this way.

Medium doesn't make it easy to share links to specific comments 🫤 and I needed an easy reference for further discussions so I created this gist.

My response

With all due respect, country flags should not be on that list.

The situation with national flag emojis in Windows is as tragic as it is unnecessary and counter-productive. There are tens of thousands of complaints and discussions of this topic online.

National flags cannot be trademarked in most jurisdictions. See [1] for a more comprehensive analysis.

But I am not trying to make a legal case for it as I am not a lawyer. I will simply mention three facts that go against the narrative:

1. Apple has national flags in their font. And they seem to be doing all right internationally. And so does Google in Android as far as I know. They also seem to get away with it somehow. But not Microsoft because... reasons? 🫤

2. Microsoft Windows includes Maps application which displays national borders. A non-trivial number of these borders is hotly contested, often with the use of deadly force. In fact, a printout from a wrong part of Maps can get you killed in a few particularly sad and violent parts of the world. And despite the controversies and endless conflicts surrounding them, borders are displayed in Maps. Now that I said it, I think maybe I should not be giving Microsoft ideas 😨

3. Of the few flags that are included in the Microsoft emoji font, some represent gender identities or sexual orientation. These concepts are not universally accepted. If the strategy was not to include emojis that have the potential to cause offence in certain less civilised parts of the world, then a worse decision couldn't have been made. In some countries where Microsoft has well established presence and is eager to do even more business, the ideas and practices represented by those emojis are outright illegal and are punishable by flogging, imprisonment, or death. And yet these emojis are included in the Microsoft font. So when there is a will, there is a way?

To conclude, I think the (well-intentioned) decision not to include national flags into core Windows fonts was a big mistake. Bearing in mind the global footprint of Windows, this decision is negatively affecting a very large population every single day. The negativity comes from inconvenience, loss of productivity, and frustration of not being able to express easily what is widely accepted as a core part of one's identity.

I am not convinced at all that a few occasional butthurts prevented by the absence of national flags in the Microsoft emoji font justify the everyday worldwide hum of low-grade frustration caused by the aforementioned absence.

This Trotskyism got to end. Please make national flags great again! 😉

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/flag-emoji/85b163bc-786a-4918-9042-763ccf4b6c05

+1

Agree!

I've just come across this constraint after some confusion about why they weren't working on a side project.

IMO, this is caution taken to an unexpected extreme on the face of it. Since the sexual orientation/gender identity flags are correctly implemented in Windows according to the Unicode spec, it leaves few conclusions to draw other than that the implied difference in the minds of MS is a fear of repercussions that go beyond merely dealing with public opinion across different cultures; and instead towards hypothetical punitive actions from states that they feel could hypothetically impact them.

Hell I am gay myself. It's absolutely nuts that I can use an emoji for that but not for the country I am a citizen of which I dare say is far easier to define and group.

The decision about which regional flags are included in Unicode in the first place can be traced through ISO 3166 back up to the UN M49 country codes that come into existence for statistical reasons inside the United Nations.

So if anything, the difficult decisions have already been made by UN requirements around areas they think are worth tracking individually. Thats as good a measure as any and seems reasonable. So their omission is no doubt due to localised and isolated groupings of business interests or aspirations (possibly even extending to unknown future interests) that happen to be potentially impacted by some of the very very few individuals who find this not reasonable and who have some capacity to impact those interests. And of course, those conclusions are heavily impacted by the fundamental appetite for risk in an org. And also the outcome will likely correlate with the business model. MS business model is very different to Google (and even more so from Apple) in ways that I think are very relevant and are in themselves a further indicator of why this has came to be.

Which is depressing, but ultimately, also not surprising. All businesses will protect their interests and they therefore they actually probably do have a valid argument here, albeit one internal to them. It is perhaps a bit less depressing than the prospect that the omission is because of obsessing about public reactions -- which, as above, I reckon would only be a secondary factor for them at best.