Sark set for internet stardom? Tiny Channel Island gets its own emoji

Sark has been recognised with its own emoji to rub shoulders with the famous smiling face with smiling eyes, crying with joy and even the notorious winking face icons. Despite Sark only being home to fewer than 600 people, the island's flag will soon be able to be added to text messages and sent all around the world after it was added to the latest emoji update. The flag will soon appear be available on Google, Facebook, X, Android and IoS once all of these organisations have added the most recent generation of emojis to their systems. Sark will join Jersey and Guernsey as the Channel Islands with flag emojis to their names.

The flag was approved by the Unicode Consortium, which updates the coding for emojis across all platforms, back in February, a move which Sark's Speaker of Chief Pleas Paul Armorgie, sees as hugely important for the island's digital footprint.

Mr Armorgie said: "Having a good online profile in the global cybersphere is vital for a small community like Sark in areas such as tourism and making online purchases and deliveries easier."Chief Pleas' Online Identity (Special) Committee was set up recently to promote the island's presence online and has already secured itself a UN-approved '.cq' domain for websites. The committee says the emoji is 'an important step to confirming Sark's identity online in today's interconnected world'. Unicode published a draft version of the Sark emoji in July.

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