As emojis become a widespread form of global messaging, San Jose leaders are calling on the world’s leading text encoders to add a symbol for the Flag of South Vietnam.
The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to urge the Unicode Consortium — the Mountain View-based organization overseeing the digitized use of text in all of the world’s writing systems — to adopt the flag of a fallen government with historical and political significance to refugees from the Vietnam War who live in San Jose.
Standard smartphones only provide the use of Vietnam’s official flag representing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which draped the nation in 1976 under communist party rule. Yet the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to the U.S. have rejected the banner over the following decades — instead clinging defiantly to the yellow flag with three stripes representing South Vietnam…