To spell Finland in English, you need six different letters. To say it in emoji, Finland would like to be known as either sauna, socks, heavy-metal headbanger or “girl power.”

The Nordic country of 5.5 million people has distilled its cultural heritage into four symbols and has been on a quest to get them recognized by the secretive Silicon Valley group that decides which playful characters are included in the emoji keyboards of the world’s smartphones.

“Girl power” emoji

“Finland is not known for many things. We don’t have the Eiffel Tower. But we do have the sauna,” says Petra Theman, director of public diplomacy for Finland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which developed the emoji. “Sauna would be ours even more if we got an emoji.”

The Unicode Consortium, which met to decide the fate of Finland’s offerings Thursday, is no bunch of smiley-faced pushovers. The group, which standardizes computer coding for characters in different languages, wants emojis to be popular, easily recognizable with just a few thousand pixels, and open to interpretation. Its guidance is followed by Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc. and many other big tech companies.

“We take a conservative approach to adding these,” says Mark Davis, Google’s chief internationalization architect, who is president of the consortium and co-chair of its Emoji Subcommittee.

Finland’s Petra Theman, third from left, helped judge an emoji spelling bee at Emojicon, a conference in San Francisco. The prize was a trip to Helsinki. Photo: Georgia Wells/The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Theman, who leads Finland’s emoji lobbying, worried conservative American cultural values would prevail. The cartoon people in Finland’s sauna emoji are naked, but don’t show any private parts. If the symbol were rejected for its nudity, Ms. Theman said Finnish people would be hurt.

There are currently nearly 2,000 emojis on a standard smartphone keyboard, ranging from dozens of variants of the familiar yellow, circular faces to a variety of hats to the flags of 247 countries. Last year Unicode added a generic taco emoji after a petition led by Yum Brands Inc.’s Taco Bell won 33,000 signatures. Mr. Davis says Unicode doesn’t consider petitions and it had privately already decided to approve the taco emoji. In 2014, a general manager of Superdawg Drive-In lobbied for a hot dog emoji. Unicode doesn’t allow corporate logos.

Unicode says no country before Finland had officially applied to add its own designated emojis.

“The fact that emoji are limited means that those that are in there are assessed as having some value,” says linguist Tyler Schnoebelen, who received a Ph.D. from Stanford University for his research on language and emotion. “It is exactly the limiting that creates value.”

He is a fan of Finland’s emojis: “The quirky but simple ones make me smile.”

Emojis convey a country’s digital savvy and sense of humor, says Ms. Theman. She thinks having a national emoji will help raise people’s awareness of Finland and may lead them to visit or learn more about businesses there. Other countries including Israel and South Korea have approached Finland to learn about making national emojis, she says. Representatives for the South Korean and Israeli governments say they aren’t currently planning to create any.

There are currently nearly 2,000 emojis on a standard smartphone keyboard. Photo: MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has long bestowed recognition for cultural assets. Such treasures as China’s Great Wall, Egypt’s pyramids, and the groundwood and board mill in Verla, Finland, a relic of Northern European paper production, have made Unesco’s list.

The closed-door decisions made by Unicode also have major cultural implications. Some Google employees recently lobbied Unicode to add more images of women and minorities to include them in the digital conversation.

Finland last year spent $33,000 to create a national set of emoji-like symbols as a part of the country’s annual online advent calendar that counts down to Christmas. (“You know Santa Claus comes from Finland,” says Ms. Theman.) They included an image of a child whose tongue is stuck to a frozen pole. (“Everyone in Finland knows what it feels like,” says Ms. Theman, speaking from experience.)

Technically they were digital stickers, not real emojis, because users had to download the images from a website or app store. They were downloaded more than 220,000 times. People started asking for real emojis because they are easier to use, Ms. Theman says.

For the Unicode application, the foreign ministry narrowed the set of emojis to four, including a woman flexing her arm in celebration of “girl power,” and a heavy-metal music fan symbolizing Finland’s favored music genre.

The sauna at the Embassy of Finland in Washington. Photo: Embassy of Finland

The sauna symbol is especially important. The word comes from ancient Finnish and the sweat rooms are central to Finnish culture. Finland’s embassies abroad include saunas, and their peacekeeping forces build saunas when they set up new bases.

Ms. Theman hired lawyers, who studied previous emoji applications, to create Finland’s June submission to Unicode’s Subcommittee of about 20 members, which evaluates hundreds of emoji proposals each year. The committee quickly eliminated the headbanger because it wasn’t different enough from the existing rock ‘n’ roll hand-gesture emoji, it wrote in an email to Ms. Theman.

In August, the Emoji Subcommittee floated the idea of removing people from the sauna emoji to only show the building. That would ruin it, since the emoji is about the activity, Ms. Theman replied. She briefly considered covering the cartoon people with towels or bikinis but decided against it. “For a Finn, that would be weird,” Ms. Theman says.

Finland’s three remaining emojis were on the shortlist of over 110 emojis that the Unicode Subcommittee sent to the 18-person Unicode Technical Committee last week. Emojis that received a majority of raised hands at the committee quarterly meeting Thursday were approved. An official announcement would be made in coming days, Unicode said.

After this story was published online, Unicode emailed the Journal to say that the socks and a modified version of Finland’s sauna emoji had been approved. That image, which Unicode calls “person in steamy room” will depict a figure with a towel, with steam rising in the background.

When informed of the decision, Ms. Theman said that while she is happy about the emoji approval, “the added towel makes it a bit more difficult for Finns to relate to it.”

Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com