The Tags Unicode block was repurposed for emoji modifiers used in regional flags.
Tags occupies U+E0000 through U+E007F and contains formatting tag characters designed to mirror ASCII. Its original purpose was language tagging: text could carry invisible characters identifying a language. That mechanism was deprecated, leaving the range available for a different role in emoji sequences.
With Emoji 5.0, released in 2017, tag characters became components of special flag sequences. A sequence begins with the black flag emoji, adds tag characters corresponding to a lowercase regional code, and ends with CANCEL TAG, U+E007F. The sequence for England, for example, encodes “gbeng”; similar sequences represent Scotland and Wales.
This differs from ordinary national flag emoji. Most country flags use two Regional Indicator Symbols based on ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, while subdivision flags use tag sequences based on regional identifiers such as GB-ENG. Support is uneven: as of Unicode 12.0, England, Scotland, and Wales were the three subdivision flag sequences recommended for general interchange.