A national flag is a flag that represents and symbolizes a country. Flags come in many shapes and designs, which often represent something about the country or people that the flag represents. Common design elements of flags include shapes such as stars, stripes, and crosses, layout elements such as including a canton (a rectangle with a distinct design, such as another national flag), and the overall shape of a flag, such as the aspect ratio of a rectangular flag (whether the flag is square or rectangle, and how wide it is) or the choice of a non-rectangular flag. Sometimes these flags are used to represent languages.
Many countries with shared history, culture, ethnicity, or religion have similarities in their flags that represent this connection. Sets of flags in this list within the same category may represent countries' shared connections, or the design similarity may be a coincidence.
Additionally, the Union Jack features in many territorial and sub-national flags. These are often Red Ensigns (e.g., Bermuda) or Blue Ensigns (e.g., New South Wales and Anguilla). A small number have backgrounds of other colors (e.g. British Antarctic Territory and Niue) or a unique pattern in the field (e.g. British Indian Ocean Territory and Hawaii). A small number put the Union Jack somewhere other than the canton (e.g. British Columbia). Unofficial flags, such as Ross Dependency also use it.
Historically
Historically
Most common aspect ratio is 2:3, followed by 1:2.
The following flags have a distinctive aspect ratio:
A dependent territory, dependent area, or dependency is a territory that does not possess full political independence or sovereignty as a sovereign state and remains politically outside the controlling state's integral area. As such, a dependent territory includes a range of non-integrated not fully to non-independent territory types, from associated states to non-self-governing territories.
Each entry below presents a list of topics about a specific nation or state (country), followed by a link to the main article for that country. Entries for nations are in bold type, while those for subnational entities are in normal (unbolded) type.
A unitary state is a sovereign state governed as a single entity in which the central government is the supreme authority. The central government may create or abolish administrative divisions. Such units exercise only the powers that the central government chooses to delegate. Although political power may be delegated through devolution to regional or local governments by statute, the central government may override the decisions of devolved governments, curtail their powers, or expand their powers. The modern unitary state concept originated in France; in the aftermath of the Hundred Years' War, national feelings that emerged from the war unified France. The war accelerated the process of transforming France from a feudal monarchy to a unitary state. The French then later spread unitary states by conquests, throughout Europe during and after the Napoleonic Wars, and to the world through the vast French colonial empire.
This gallery of sovereign state flags shows the national or state flags of sovereign states that appear on the list of sovereign states. For flags of other entities, please see gallery of flags of dependent territories. Each flag is depicted as if the flagpole is positioned on the left of the flag, except for those of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia which are depicted with the hoist to the right.
A federacy is a form of government where one or several substate units enjoy considerably more independence than the majority of the substate units. To some extent, such an arrangement can be considered to be similar to asymmetric federalism.
This is a list of lists on the cities of present-day nations, states and dependencies. Countries are listed in bold under their respective pages, whereas territories and dependencies are not. Disputed and unrecognized countries are italicized.
This is a list of articles holding galleries of maps of present-day countries and dependencies. The list includes all countries listed in the List of countries, the French overseas departments, the Spanish and Portuguese overseas regions and inhabited overseas dependencies.
This is a list of articles covering the history of present-day nations, states, and dependencies. Countries are listed in bold under their respective pages, whereas territories and dependencies are not. Disputed and unrecognized countries are italicized.
This is a list of articles covering the archaeology of present-day nations, states, and dependencies. Countries are listed in bold under their respective pages, whereas territories and dependencies are not. Disputed and unrecognized countries are italicized.