kava48 wrote:
To the Apple Emoji and Unicode Team,
This is a user-to-user forum. You are not speaking to Apple, or to anyone representing the Unicode Consortium..
I am writing on behalf of millions of Kurdish people around the world regarding the absence of the Kurdistan flag emoji on Apple devices.
Apple doesn't control the allocation of flag emoji. The Unicode Consortium does – and they're not accepting any proposals for new flag emojis.
You can read all about it here: Unicode Consortium (March 28, 2022) – The Past and Future of Flag Emoji
The bottom line is that if Kurdistan becomes a country recognized by the U.N., with its own Unicode region code, the Unicode Consortium will automatically recommend a flag emoji for it. Otherwise, you're out of luck. The blog article actually gives Iraqi Kurdistan as an example:
"My region was assigned a 3166-2 code. Do we have to submit a proposal?
No, the Emoji Subcommittee is no longer taking in any proposals for flags of any kind.
As a recent example, Kurdistan (a subdivision of Iraq) became an official subdivision in ISO 3166-2 (IQ-KR) on May 3, 2021. The corresponding Unicode subdivision code (iqkr) is slated for release in CLDR v41 on Apr 6, 2022. At that point the flag for Kurdistan will officially be valid — any platform, app, or font could support it. But that doesn’t mean it automatically gets in the queue for everyone’s phone. Only countries with ISO 3166-1 region codes are automatically recommended and require no proposal to move forward."
So let's say that you sent feedback to Apple:
Product Feedback - Apple
and they created a Iraqi Kurdistan flag character that they put into some future release of iOS. There would still be no guarantee that someone on an Android phone, a flip phone, or an older iPhone would see anything useful when you sent that character. (And since the character would not officially be an emoji, it probably would not be as easy to access it as it is to access things that are emoji.)
As an alternative to an emoji, you could consider creating and using a sticker:
Make stickers from your photos on iPhone - Apple Support
Stickers are not emoji – they are small pictures that are transmitted as pictures, rather than as Unicode characters. But in these days of unlimited data plans and fast cellular networks, transmitting small pictures isn't a big deal; and you can create your own stickers with no approval needed from the Unicode Consortium or other standards bodies.
More than 40 to 50 million Kurds live across different parts of the world. Kurdish people have their own language, culture, history, and identity that have existed for generations. Despite this, the Kurdistan flag is still not represented among the available emojis, while many other cultural and regional flags are included.
If you can get your own country, recognized by the UN, you can get your own flag emoji. Otherwise, see above.
