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Flags of England, Wales and Scotland given thumbs up by emoji chiefs

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The new flag emojis should be available on smartphones and tablets next year
The new flag emojis should be available on smartphones and tablets next year Credit:  MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty

Flags of England, Wales and Scotland will finally be available as smartphone emojis after getting approval from computer chiefs.

Until now, Britons have been able to send emojis of the Union Flag, but not of the individual nations.

Flags for countries including Ascension Island, St Barthelemy, Curaçao, Diego Garcia and Djibouti are all currently available on smartphones, but there is no St George's cross or Welsh Dragon.

However, the new flag emojis should be available on smartphones and tablets next year after getting approval from bosses at Unicode.

The omission led to a campaign earlier this year from Jeremy Burge, the London-based founder of online emoji catalogue Emojipedia, for Unicode – the consortium whose members include Apple, Google and Microsoft that decides on new emoji – to include the flags.

After Mr Burge co-authored a proposal this year, Unicode’s president Mark David this month proposed a set of standards that would allow the introduction of “regional” flags, such as home countries and US states. Mr David acknowledged the campaign for individual flags, saying: “There is great demand for the flags for subregions within countries.”

Unicode, the authority on computer text and characters, has recommended the flags are made available but it will be up to manufacturers to add the new emojis to keyboards.

Flags for individual US states were also approved, but a flag for Northern Ireland was not.

The lack of home nation flags is often lamented on social media, and searches for English, Scottish and Welsh emoji are consistently high. Interest in the icons peaked during this summer’s European football championships, when Welsh players such as Gareth Bale resorted to the “dragon” emoji and England’s to using the lion symbol.

Welsh smartphone user Nick Morgan, 32, of Swansea, said: "It's weird there wasn't one anyway. I can get flags for countries all over the wold but not the place where I was born and raised.

"Wales has a great flag and I'm very proud of it. We should have our own emoji and this has been a long time coming.

"I'm glad this has finally happened it will make for good banter with my English and Scottish friends during the Six Nations."