Regional indicator symbol
set of 26 Unicode symbols intended to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country or territory codes (with 2 letters) and to allow their optional treatment as an emoji flag sequence
The regional indicator symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic Unicode characters (A–Z) intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment.
These were defined by October 2010 as part of the Unicode 6.0 support for emoji, as an alternative to encoding separate characters for each country flag. Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state).
They are encoded in the range U+1F1E6 🇦 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER A to U+1F1FF 🇿 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER Z within the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.
Emoji flag sequences
A pair of regional indicator symbols is referred to as an emoji flag sequence (although it represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region).
Out of the 676 possible pairs of regional indicator symbols (26 × 26), only 270 are considered valid Unicode region codes.
These are a subset of the region sequences in the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR):
All 256 regular region sequences in the CLDR
249 officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes
6 exceptional reservations (Ascension Island, Clipperton Island, Diego Garcia, Ceuta and Melilla, Canary Islands, and Tristan da Cunha)
1 user-assigned temporary country code (Kosovo)
Two of the 35 macroregion sequences in the CLDR (EU and UN)
All 12 deprecated region sequences in the CLDR (strongly discouraged—intended for backward compatibility only)
Some providers may internally have assigned specific codes to deprecated sequences or to unofficial ones, just like WhatsApp did by putting the Texas flag as XT (🇽🇹).
A separate mechanism (emoji tag sequences) is used for regional flags, such as England 🏴, Scotland 🏴, Wales 🏴, Texas 🏴 or California 🏴.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Regional indicator symbol” as set of 26 Unicode symbols intended to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country or territory codes (with 2 letters) and to allow their optional treatment as an emoji flag sequence. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as set of 26 Unicode symbols intended to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country or territory codes (with 2 letters) and to allow their optional treatment as an emoji flag sequence. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17081746. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Regional indicator symbol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.