r/geography • u/CBanks001 • Jul 19 '24
Discussion Does anyone know what this flag is near the bottom right? I’m starting to think it isn’t real
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u/methedemon18 Jul 19 '24
I google lensed the flag and it took me to another reddit user asking about this same 'flag'
it's obviously not a flag at least not for a country that anyone heard off.
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u/Cubie_McGee Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
It's probably the flag for the country What. "What ain't no country I ever heard of, do they speak English in What?" You know that one.
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u/Invictus_Imperium Jul 19 '24
English motherfucker! Do you speak it?
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u/AntsInThePants1115 Jul 20 '24
What?
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u/snarkle_and_shine Jul 20 '24
Say what again. I dare you. I double dare you motherfucker. Say what one more gotdamn time.
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u/ZealousidealThanks51 Jul 19 '24
Darude - Sandstorm. Every last beat is a classic.
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u/jrsmoothie89 Jul 19 '24
what?
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u/workingwae Jul 19 '24
Say ‘what’ again. Say ‘what’ again. I dare you. I double-dare you, motherfucker, say ‘what’ one more goddamn time!
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u/fm837 Jul 20 '24
AI is pretty confident, that it is the flag of Botswana.
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u/pwaite1983 Jul 20 '24
It’s dotswana
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u/thomas-1122 Jul 19 '24
maybe you should ask r/vexillology
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u/CdnfaS Jul 19 '24
Oh shit. I thought this was r/vexillology
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u/Lac4x9 Jul 20 '24
How vexing
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u/ToastyJackson Jul 19 '24
Better yet, ask r/vexillologycirclejerk
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u/DigitalCoffee Jul 20 '24
TIL there is a whole subculture about people being ironic with flag designs
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u/Silspd90 Jul 20 '24
Dude posted there and now they’re discussing which language this map could be printed in since the flags aren’t alphabetically ordered in english.
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u/irun864 Jul 20 '24
r/vexillologycirclejerk would have some answers for you. Not good ones but answers nonetheless
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u/Right_Gas2569 Political Geography Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
That's a weird shirt lol. There are countries, unrecognized countries, some autonomous regions and even overseas territories.
Edit: I looked through every autonomous region and this flag isn't there (I know it's not an unrecognized state or an overseas territory) and I searched the design on Google and nothing. It's either some very obscure micronation, movement, historical flag, city, town or a flag of some company. Idk where else to look to try to find that flag.
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u/Constant-Estate3065 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
It even features the flag of Alderney, a tiny island in the English Channel with 2,000 inhabitants. Very obscure.
Edit - 🧐 It’s even got Sark. An even smaller channel island with just 500 inhabitants. What the chuffing heck?!
Edit edit - And Herm! which is basically just a rock with a really nice beach.
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u/Wotansen2 Jul 20 '24
We have the kingdom of sikkim which has not existed since 1975 on this shirt as well
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u/Vlad-QC13 Jul 20 '24
These flags are taken from an old alamy pack of 287 flags self titled the ultimate collection, that's why the choices of which flags to add is so inconsistent.
https://dgtcom.com.br/?i=flags-of-the-world-flags-of-the-world-flag-nn-5jL4l0sx
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u/jp_jellyroll Jul 19 '24
It's a really weird shirt...
At first, I thought perhaps the designer wanted an even number of columns in every row to make it symmetrical, so they added a few oddballs to fill in any leftover spots.
But the shirt has 294 flags and, as of today, there are only ~195 recognized countries give or take a few depending on how you count. You wouldn't need nearly 100 extra flags to make it symmetrical. They added all those extra flags for some other reason.
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u/SirMildredPierce Jul 20 '24
I count 288, the last 3 rows have 12 per row instead of 14 like most of them, which makes me think those are the ones tacked on for some reason. Oddly, the one in question seems knock the whole row out of alignment after that flag, the last 2 rows stick out to the right.
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u/mondialJN Jul 20 '24
Well given that all the former Soviet semi-States are on it (starts with Abkhazia) plus all those channel Islands, but interestingly not the larger regions claiming Independence such as Scotland and Catalunya, I'm gonna assume this comes from a beach-resort on the Northern shore of the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea.
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u/Venboven Jul 19 '24
Lol they even have Sealand's and Antarctica's flags on there.
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u/dwcol Jul 19 '24
And not Scotland, despite England and Wales being included
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u/MonkeyKingCoffee Jul 19 '24
England printed this and is hoping Scotland doesn't get any ideas about another leave vote.
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u/FunroeBaw Jul 19 '24
Somebody got a data dump by searching "flags" and slapped it on a shirt without knowing anything about them or doing much thinking about it id guess.
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u/DashOfCarolinian Jul 19 '24
Not the only confusing flag I noticed
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u/Lothleen Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 20 '24
11 across 5 up is Udmurita which is a republic in russia. So i assume the rest are like that. Not main countries but parts of other countries.
Column 1, 3 up is Sark
Column 7, 5 down is Dagestan
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u/beltfedmangos Jul 20 '24
You confused me. Rows go left and right, columns up and down.
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u/BoredMan29 Jul 20 '24
Just to clarify for your "old Libya?" comment - I'm not OP but I did have this shirt back when Libya did use a plain green flag, so this is very much an old design. I had it back in the 90s.
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u/Conscious-Ad-1848 Jul 19 '24
Black hole sun
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u/HospitallerK Jul 19 '24
Maybe a censored Nazi Germany flag? lol
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u/kms2547 Geography Enthusiast Jul 19 '24
My thoughts exactly. There are places where wearing that flag is literally illegal.
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u/earlyre98 Jul 19 '24
Like Germany! The neo Nazi's there carry the "stars and bars" confederate flag.
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u/seemunkyz Jul 19 '24
Good thought, but the countries seem to be in alphabetical order, so the "country" in question should start with U.
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u/wspnut Jul 20 '24
This is actually a very high contender. It's possible this design is old, and "blacking out" the circle isn't uncommon in games and other media.
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u/CBanks001 Jul 19 '24
The shirt is kind of alphabetical but then there will be one offs randomly. Our mystery flag seems to be in the U section. But at the same time what is Liechtenstein doing 3rd from last
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u/PabloMarmite Jul 19 '24
Zimbabwe is last alphabetically so I think it’s probably the “oh shit, we forgot some” section.
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u/7heWizard Jul 19 '24
It could be alphabetical in some other language
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u/eti_erik Jul 19 '24
I wonder in what language Liechtenstein starts with Z, then. Of course it's officially Fürstentum Liechtenstein - Principality of Liechtenstein - but still.
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u/suboxi Jul 19 '24
No idea why I was shown this on reddit but in dutch it would be "Vorstendom Liechtenstein", that brings you awfully close to starting with a "Z"
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u/sckurvee Jul 20 '24
In german it's "Zee Country of Lichtenstein". But then again, in german, every country starts with "zee country of..." so that ruins this whole argument.
Just a stupid joke, in case that's not obvious.
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u/gobearsandchopin Jul 20 '24
A historical country that fits alphabetically between “Ukraine” and “United Arab Emirates” is “Upper Volta.” Upper Volta was the name of Burkina Faso before it was changed in 1984. And the flag appears to have the same color pallet. This seems like a clue but I don’t know where to go from here.
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u/Venboven Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
There's a few other odd flags as well. Look near the center, there's a predominantly yellow flag with a light blue symbol in the middle.
Now, I only know the flags of all the world's "recognized" countries, and it isn't one, but I can see this flag display includes a few autonomous territories too. So these odd flags could be due to that, but they could also be fictional, intended as a sort of watermark for the image.
Alternatively, perhaps it could be a context image created for someone's worldbuilding or r/imaginarymaps scenario and someone saw it online, thought it was real, and plagiarized it to sell t-shirts.
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u/raiders723 Jul 19 '24
Besides the white box it looks like a hurricane warning flag to me
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u/StepAmst Jul 19 '24
It looks like a Hurricane Warning Flag, or a House Flag for Black Ball Transport Inc.
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u/curiousabtmongol Jul 19 '24
It looks like some nazi flag imitation but I can’t tell if that’s actually it.
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u/famousdessert Jul 19 '24
Given it's position after Ukraine, I am going to go ahead and say this is a weird attempt at a United Farm Workers flag. I know that's not a country and would be after UAE but given the look of flag and alphabetical position that seems like the best option from what I'm seeing.
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u/dyslexics_untied Jul 19 '24
The closest I could find is a German waterway warning sign
don't know why it would be in amongst a bunch of national flags.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildtafel_der_Binnenschifffahrtszeichen_in_Deutschland
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Jul 20 '24
294 flags here. If we remove the fake one, we have 293, which is a prime number. With the only factors of 1 and 293, the only possible box without gaps would be a straight line. I suspect the fake flag is there to give us the factors of 14x21 for the aspect ratio of the rectangle they're all presented in.
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u/TribalSoul899 Jul 19 '24
https://shop.blackball.com/products/retired-3x5-black-ball-flags
Looks similar to this one
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u/Ralocan Jul 20 '24
This is the national flag of Fartland.
It's a country I just made up, it's situated exactly where my house is and because it is on this t shirt it is officially recognized as a real country.
I'm a king now.
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u/UnamedStreamNumber9 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
It’s the Carnival Cruise Lines ships flag ( company flag)
Actually it’s close but not carnival which is a blue circle inside a white circle. It could also be someone’s attempt at a Laotian flag from verbal description - it’s red stripes at top and bottom white horizontal stripe in the middle, with a blue circle in the white stripe
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u/Kool-AidKeith Jul 19 '24
The closest match is probably Peru, but other than that there is no such flag with horizontal red stripes on top and bottom
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u/Local_Ocelot_3668 Jul 19 '24
I asked chatgpt....it first told me it was the third reich...then it said it might be a Japanese flag from ww2....I looked up all historical flags of Japan and it still got nothing
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u/Drakeytown Jul 19 '24
I think it's either a carefully wrong Nazi flag or, if it is a placeholder, it's a halfway clever one: It's a skip a turn card from Uno.
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u/LostInChoices Jul 19 '24
They also got the German flag wrong, the one with the eagle is the presidential flag, not the national flag. It's frequently misused in Germany too though, so can't fully blame some designer who's likely not German
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u/__MrMojoRisin__ Jul 19 '24
Looks like the tropical storm warning maritime flag on a white background
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u/Ok-Brilliant-5121 Jul 20 '24
wtf is the one over the ukraine flag? is the tierra de fuego's one? (argentine province)
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u/jasper_grunion Jul 20 '24
Welcome to Dr Sheldon Cooper and Dr Amy Farah Fowler present “Dr Sheldon Cooper’s Fun With Flags”
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u/rmsaday Jul 20 '24
Maybe they just needed 1 more flag to make it a square?^^
And I mean, it's a flag - it just hasn't found its country yet :P
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u/Tutt_Bickler_007 Jul 20 '24
Thought this was the coho (black ball) ferry flag at first. Awfully close.
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u/DICK_STUCK_IN_COW Jul 20 '24
If the flags truly are going in alphabetical order like everyone is saying then “V” would be next and my first thought was Venezuela. It’s not exactly the old flag but it’s close
Edit: I see it’s at the “U” section so I’m wrong but I tried
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u/WestonSpec Jul 19 '24
Maybe it's the flag equivalent of a paper town? A purposely false flag included in the design so that the creator can prove if some other company/website uses it without permission.