True, I realized this after posting. After quickly looking it up, it turns out they were added a few years later and differ slightly from the rest of the flags. According to the probably correct source of Emojipedia, you can see the difference here:
Provisions for a Northern Ireland one also exists but sadly no manufacturer adopts it because of the flag controversy. It’s GBNIR. You can actually go to the root of Google’s emoji source code and enable it and build the font which will include the Northern Ireland flag!
True, I realized this after posting. After quickly looking it up, it turns out they were added a few years later and differ slightly from the rest of the flags. According to the probably correct source of Emojipedia, you can see the difference here:
https://emojipedia.org/flag-england https://emojipedia.org/flag-united-kingdom
Tl;dr
🇬🇧 = ‘GB’
🏴 = ‘🏴gbeng[cancel symbol]’
🏴 = ‘🏴gbsct[cancel symbol]’
🏴 = ‘🏴gbwls[cancel symbol]’
With the lower case letters representing “Tag Latin Small Letter X” and the upper case letters representing “Regional Indicator Symbol Letter X”
Provisions for a Northern Ireland one also exists but sadly no manufacturer adopts it because of the flag controversy. It’s GBNIR. You can actually go to the root of Google’s emoji source code and enable it and build the font which will include the Northern Ireland flag!
Probably because they have six characters instead of two. GB-SCT for example is the scottish flag