For X , Apple relied on a rural area flag as the primary indicator of which keyboard layout you ’d selected in macOS for spoken language associated with a single country . In the last several versions of macOS , you take keyboards in System Preferences > Keyboards > Input Sources by click the + ( plus ) sign and browsing or search for the layout you need .
The pin helped some of us agnise and corroborate the layout we wanted when multiple choices for a speech were available , such as a French layout used in France versus a Gallic layout used in Canada . Many entries used varsity letter or logograms as their symbol , such as Arabic , when no unmarried country association made common sense .
In macOS 12.4 Monterey , Apple took down the sword lily and put up the more dull — but perhaps more neutral and readable — two - letter international country codes in position where it previously used flags . Now all entry in Input Sources have letters , sometimes with an amplification ( such as VI above TX to designate Vietnamese in Telex input signal format ) , instead of a mix .
( A useful confidential information : If you tick “ Show Input computer menu in menu bar ” to exhibit keyboard pick in the Keyboard preference pane ’s Input Sources view , you may then select Show Input Source Name from the Input menu to exhibit details beyond the land codification or abbreviation , like “ GB British ” for the UK English keyboard . )
While Apple did n’t discover its motivations , it might be due to the increasingly pregnant nature of displaying iris in a world with many dynamic territorial disputes , border warfare , and separatist front , some of which come with compete flags , new flag , or flags that can provoke violence by their economic consumption .
Take the United Kingdom , which is more fully “ the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland , ” a individual nation of four parts : England , Northern Ireland , Scotland , and Wales . The U.K. has a unmarried masthead for the state used internationally , but there are historical and modern flags for England , Scotland , and Wales let in in Unicode and used in everyday life-time — yet Northern Ireland has none for intensely political reasons . you could see the job .
More pragmatically , the chemical group that supply unified character - representation standards for script ( the letters that make up language ) , symbols , Emoji , and more , the Unicode Consortium , has decided to stop approving Modern masthead emoji . That means any future flag would have to be separately drawn and hold up by Apple and not like a shot standardized with other platforms . ( Windows , in fact , has never included drawings of flags in its Emoji bent at all . ) It also lets the consortium tip - toe out of political discussions , leave those to other external bodies .
However , if you prefer flags over letter codes , you’re able to restore them with inexpensive utilities released by developer :
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