Flag: Tokelau

A yellow sailing canoe heading for the Southern Cross on a blue sea. The canoe is a Tokelauan vaka, a traditional Polynesian outrigger, and it stands for the Tokelauan people and their life on the ocean. The four white stars are the Southern Cross, the constellation Tokelauan fishermen have steered by for centuries. Tokelau's own explanation reads the picture as a voyage, with the canoe carrying the people toward self-government under a sky they know how to navigate. Tokelau launched its own flag in 2009; until then the New Zealand flag served at official occasions.

Tokelau itself (in English, say it roughly "TOH-keh-lau", with "lau" rhyming with "how") is three atolls, Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo, a few metres above sea level and about 500 kilometres north of Samoa. There is no airport; the only way in is a boat from Samoa that takes about a day. Fewer people live there than in a small town, and far more Tokelauans live in New Zealand than at home. Tokelau is a territory of New Zealand with wide self-administration, its own Polynesian language and its own country code, TK, which is what the two letters behind this emoji spell.

What does it mean when someone sends 🇹🇰?

Usually pride: this is my island, my family, my people. Tokelauans, most of them in New Zealand, use it the way anyone uses a home flag: in bios, next to a name, on posts for Tokelau Language Week or National Flag Day (22 October), or beside 🇳🇿 and 🇼🇸 to show the places a family spans. From anyone else it is often a travel or geography flex: a post about reaching one of the remotest inhabited places on the planet, a quiz about tiny territories, or a flag collector working through the whole alphabet.

It carries no slang meaning and no edge. The one misreading worth knowing is the letters: TK here means Tokelau, not Tokyo and not any person's initials. And if your screen shows plain T K where a flag should be, the sender did send a flag; your device simply lacks the image.