The hidden language of flags

Stand in an airport arrivals hall and look up at the row of flags above the desks. Most people see decoration. What's hanging there is a row of arguments, each one compressed into a rectangle small enough to sew.

None of it is accidental. Colours get chosen, defended and legislated. Proportions are written into constitutions. Somewhere behind almost every one of those rectangles there was a committee, and in that committee there was a fight.

The study of it has a name. Vexillology, from vexillum, the small square standard the Roman cavalry carried on a crossbar. The word is much younger than the subject — Whitney Smith invented it in 1957, while he was still a teenager, and then spent the rest of his life turning it into an actual field of study. He later designed the flag of Guyana, which is a reasonable career.

The parts have names, and the names matter

A flag is not a picture. It's a piece of cloth that spends its life half-furled, hanging limp, or snapping about in wind, and the vocabulary exists because those conditions change what you can see.

The edge nearest the pole is the hoist. The free edge that does the flapping is the fly. The background is the field, anything sitting on it is a charge, and the upper quarter next to the hoist — the canton — is the single most valuable piece of real estate on the whole thing. That's not aesthetics. When a flag droops, the canton is the part that stays visible, because it's closest to the pole and gravity hasn't got much to fold. Every country that put a smaller flag or a cluster of stars up there was making a claim it wanted readable on a still day.

Proportions are specified too, and they don't agree. A lot of the world uses 2:3. Britain's Union Flag is 1:2 on land. The United States uses 10:19, which is oddly specific and comes from executive order rather than legislation. Switzerland and Vatican City are square. Nepal isn't any of these, and we'll come back to it.

Colours, oddly, are the part most often left vague. Plenty of countries have never legally defined the exact shade of their own flag, which is why the red on two manufacturers' versions of the same national flag can be visibly different and neither is wrong.

Colours are claims, not descriptions

The usual shorthand — red for blood, white for peace, green for the land — is roughly true and completely unreliable. Meanings get attached after the fact as often as before it, and the same three colours will be explained differently in two neighbouring countries.

What can be said with confidence is what a country says about its own flag. India's is a good case, because the interpretation is on the record. The tricolour was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 22 July 1947, and the explanation offered at the time gave saffron for courage and sacrifice, white for truth and peace, green for faith and prosperity, with the navy Ashoka Chakra in the middle — a twenty-four-spoked wheel taken from the Lion Capital at Sarnath, standing for law, and for motion. A wheel was chosen partly because it rolls. A nation that stops moving was the idea.

Japan went the other way and compressed everything into one shape. A red disc on white. The country's name, in the characters used to write it, means something like "origin of the sun", so the flag is very nearly a literal translation of the word Japan.

Some flags are blunter still. Mozambique's carries a Kalashnikov crossed with a hoe over an open book — one of very few national flags depicting a modern firearm, and adopted with the meaning entirely explicit rather than symbolic.

And a small number of flags aren't the same on both sides. Paraguay's has one emblem on the front and a different one on the back, so a correctly made Paraguayan flag needs two separate designs stitched together. Saudi Arabia's has to be mirrored for a related reason: the inscription must read correctly whichever side you're standing on.

The Nordic cross, and how a design spreads

Look at the flags of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland side by side and the family resemblance is impossible to miss. Same off-centre cross, arm shifted towards the hoist, different colours.

Denmark's came first, and it's generally reckoned the oldest national flag still in use. The story attached to it is that the Dannebrog fell out of the sky during a battle in Estonia in 1219, turning a losing fight around. That account doesn't show up in writing until roughly three hundred years later, which is a long gap, and historians treat it as legend rather than record. The flag is old regardless. The origin story just isn't evidence.

The rest followed over the next six centuries. Sweden's cross is documented from the sixteenth century. Norway's current design was drawn by a member of parliament, Fredrik Meltzer, and adopted in 1821 — he took the Danish flag and laid a blue cross inside the white one, which quietly says two things about Norwegian history at once. Iceland's design dates from 1915 and became the flag of an independent state in 1944. Finland's arrived in 1918.

The pattern kept going after the national flags were settled. The Faroes, Åland, Shetland and Orkney all use it, and so do a number of Scandinavian regions and towns. It works as a signature: see that cross and you can place the flag within a few hundred miles without knowing anything else about it.

Colour families and what they announce

Once you've seen the Nordic cross you start seeing the other families, and they're doing the same job — declaring which group a country wanted to be counted in on the day the flag was adopted.

Green, gold and red run right across Africa. The usual account traces them to Ethiopia, which had kept its independence through the European scramble for the continent and so made an obvious reference point. Ghana adopted them in 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony to become independent, in a design by the artist Theodosia Okoh, with a black star in the centre. Country after country followed over the next decade. Nobody was copying Ethiopia's landscape. They were copying its record.

Black, white, green and red recur across the Arab world, conventionally linked to the colours of successive dynasties and popularised through the flag of the Arab Revolt during the First World War. Red, white and blue in various arrangements mark out much of the Slavic world, a set usually traced to the Russian tricolour by way of the Prague congress of 1848.

The useful consequence is a rule of thumb that actually works. A national flag tells you less about a country's rivers and mountains than about its alignment at a particular moment, and where a design deliberately breaks from its regional family, that break is usually the message.

The rules for a good flag are short and brutal

Vexillologists have a working set of design principles, and they're less woolly than you'd expect. The standard statement of them is a short pamphlet by Ted Kaye, published by the North American Vexillological Association in 2001 under the title Good Flag, Bad Flag. Five rules, and no hedging.

• Keep it simple. A child should be able to draw it from memory.
• Use meaningful symbolism. The images and colours should relate to what they stand for.
• Use two or three basic colours. From a standard set, and with good contrast between them.
• No lettering or seals. Writing is unreadable at distance and backwards from the other side.
• Be distinctive, or be deliberately related. Either stand apart or join a family on purpose.

Kaye's practical test is to sketch the design on a rectangle about the size of a postage stamp held at arm's length, because that's roughly the angular size of a real flag at a real distance. Anything that survives that will survive a stadium. Anything that doesn't is a logo, not a flag.

The rule everyone breaks is the fourth one. NAVA ran a public survey in 2001 covering the flags of US states, US territories and Canadian provinces, and the results were unkind: a large share of them are a state seal dropped onto a plain blue field, which at any real distance is an indistinguishable blue smudge. New Mexico came top, with a red sun symbol on yellow and not a word of text on it. Georgia's flag of the time came last of the seventy-two.

None of which means a rule-breaking flag can't be loved. It means it can't be recognised.

The flags that refuse to be rectangles

Nepal is the famous one — the only national flag that isn't a quadrilateral. Two stacked crimson pennants with blue borders, carrying a stylised moon and sun. The 1962 constitution didn't just describe it, it specified the construction geometrically, with a sequence of steps involving lines, arcs and intersections that produce the shape exactly. It's the only national flag defined as a compass-and-straightedge problem.

Switzerland and Vatican City are the only two that are perfectly square, which trips people up constantly, because the Swiss flag most people picture is the rectangular civil ensign used at sea and on merchant shipping.

Ohio flies a swallowtail — a burgee — and is the only US state that doesn't use a rectangle. And from 1977 to 2011, Libya flew a plain green field with nothing on it at all, the only solid-colour national flag there has ever been. Whatever else you think of it, it passes rule one comfortably.

Flags started as signalling equipment

Most of the conventions people find fussy exist because a flag was originally a way of telling another ship something before it was close enough to shout.

That system still runs. The International Code of Signals gives every letter of the alphabet a flag, and each flag a standard meaning when flown alone. A plain yellow square — the letter Q — means the ship is healthy and requesting clearance to enter port, which is a survival of centuries of quarantine practice. The blue and white swallowtail, A, means there's a diver in the water and you should keep well clear at slow speed. None of these are decorative. They're designed to be unmistakable at distance in bad light, which is why they use flat blocks of a handful of colours and no fine detail whatsoever.

The distress conventions come from the same place. Flying a flag upside down is, in several traditions, a formal signal that something has gone badly wrong rather than an insult — which is why the mistake occasionally causes an incident. The Philippines is the odd case here: its flag has the blue band uppermost in peacetime and the red band uppermost in war, making it the only national flag with an official inverted state.

Half-mast is defined more precisely than people assume. The convention is to raise the flag fully to the top first, then lower it — and the "half" position is usually specified as one flag-width down from the peak, not judged by eye.

Redesigns are arguments about the country

Changing a flag is never a design exercise, and every country that has tried it found that out quickly.

Canada's took most of 1964. The existing Red Ensign carried the Union Jack in the canton, and removing it split the country along lines that had very little to do with cloth. Parliament deadlocked for months in what's remembered as the Great Flag Debate, a committee eventually settled on a concept proposed by the historian George Stanley, and the maple leaf was proclaimed in February 1965. The leaf was simplified down to eleven points along the way; the stylised version reads more cleanly in motion than a botanically accurate one, which blurs into a green-red mess the moment there's wind.

South Africa's was the opposite — designed under enormous time pressure as apartheid ended, by the State Herald, Frederick Brownell, and first flown on 27 April 1994 for the first democratic elections. It was meant to be temporary. It was adopted so completely that the interim label just quietly stopped being used.

New Zealand went through the whole process properly and then didn't change anything. A long public design programme produced thousands of submissions, a shortlist, and two referendums in 2015 and 2016. The alternative that made the final round was a silver fern design by Kyle Lockwood. Voters kept the existing flag by roughly fifty-seven per cent to forty-three.

That result is the most instructive thing in this entire subject. By the design rules, the existing New Zealand flag has real problems — it's easily confused with Australia's, it carries another country's flag in its canton, and no child is drawing it from memory. It won anyway.

What the rules can't measure

The principles explain why some flags work as objects. Simple shapes read at distance. Two or three colours survive a cheap printer, a lapel pin and a badly lit television camera. Lettering doesn't. All of that is measurable, and none of it is in dispute.

What the principles can't touch is the other half. A flag accumulates its meaning through use — through funerals and medal ceremonies and border crossings and dull civic occasions — and that accumulation doesn't care whether the composition is any good. Familiarity beats quality, reliably, whenever the two are put to a vote.

So there are two separate questions hiding inside "is that a good flag", and people arguing about it are usually answering different ones.

Next time you're in that arrivals hall, give the row above the desks ten seconds. Count the colours. Find the canton. Ask which family it belongs to, and whether it joined on purpose. You'll be right more often than you'd expect, and when you're wrong there's usually a committee somewhere to blame.