In honor of President’s Day (in the US), here’s a list of Unicode flag emojis!

Unicode Flags and the ISO

Unicode’s flag standard is based on ISO 3166-1. In other words, a country only gets a Unicode flag if it’s listed in ISO 3166-1. In case you’re curious: ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization, and it’s basically an NGO that sets standards for things ranging from food safety to environmental management to technology. According to the ISO website, they recently published a standard for drinking straws. In the technology space, they are one of several well known groups tasked with setting standards.

Unicode Flags for the 30 Most Populous Countries

ISO 3166-1 is a pretty big list, so we decided we’d pick the top 30. Below is a list of the Unicode flag emojis for the most populous countries in the world, sorted by population (according to the 2016 US Census Bureau).

Technical Note – “I don’t see the flags!”

Unfortunately, Windows currently does not support Unicode flags, so you’ll just see a two letter country abbreviation (or a box) instead of a flag if you’re on Windows. Try opening this blog post on your iPhone or Android, and as long as you’re running one of the newer versions of the software, it should work!

And how could we forget Canada? Canada is technically the 38th most populous country according to the US Census Bureau but here is their flag anyway: ??