Afghanistan Emoji

🇦🇫 the Afghanistan flag emoji is not a picture stored in your text. It is a pair of regional indicator letters, 🇦 and 🇫, for the country code AF, which phones and Macs join into a flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters AF instead; the person you send it to still sees a flag on their phone.

Unicode does not decide what that flag looks like; each emoji font does. At the time of writing the major phone emoji sets draw the black, red and green vertical tricolour with the white national emblem in the middle, a mosque with its mihrab and minbar framed by two sheaves of wheat. That is the flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, used from 2004 to 2021. Since August 2021 the Taliban have flown a white flag with the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith, written across it in black, which is why people search for "afghanistan flag emoji change" or "taliban". There is no separate emoji for the white flag: AF is the only code for the country, so each font shows one design for it, and what you see depends on your device.

The black, red and green colours go back to the early 20th century and are usually explained as black for a dark past, red for the blood shed for independence and green for hope and Islam. Afghans at home and abroad write them as 🖤❤️💚 or ⬛🟥🟩, in usernames, on match days and in posts for Independence Day on 19 August, which marks 1919, when Afghanistan won full control of its foreign affairs from Britain.

Afghani sign ؋ and Afghan numbers: copy and paste or type them

؋ is the afghani sign, Unicode U+060B, an Arabic-script currency sign. The afghani (code AFN) is divided into 100 puls; the new afghani of 2002 replaced the old one at 1,000 to 1. In shops and on price boards you will just as often see the word افغانی or the short form Af, as in 500 Af. To type ؋ in Microsoft Word, type 060B and press Alt+X; in HTML it is ؋; otherwise copy it from this page. 💱 stands for the money changers, and Kabul's Sarai Shahzada market, where traders change currencies in cash from stalls and stairwells, is famous for them.

Dari and Pashto write numbers with their own digits: ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹. They are the Persian forms of the Eastern Arabic digits, and three of them look different from the ones used in Arab countries: ۴ ۵ ۶ here against ٤ ٥ ٦ there. The digits run left to right inside right-to-left text, just as in English, so ۱۴۰۵ is 1405, a year in the Afghan solar calendar. You meet them on licence plates, money, dates and prices: ۵۰۰ ؋ is 500 afghanis.

Dari and Pashto letters to copy and paste

Afghanistan's two official languages, Dari and Pashto, are both written right to left in the Arabic script, with letters added for sounds Arabic does not have. By CLDR estimates around 20 million people in the country speak Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, and around 17 million speak Pashto; Hazaragi, Uzbek, Turkmen and Balochi follow, each with its own collection here.

Dari uses the 32-letter Persian alphabet: Arabic's 28 plus پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh, the s in "measure") and گ (g). It also writes kaf as ک and ye as ی, the Persian shapes, not Arabic ك and ي. They look almost the same in a word, but they are different characters, and using the Arabic ones can make Dari text fail in searches.

Pashto has the most letters of the two, usually counted as 44. Its own are the retroflex consonants, made with the tongue curled back, each marked with a small ring: ټ (ṭ), ډ (ḍ), ړ (ṛ, a flapped r) and ڼ (ṇ); ځ (dz) and څ (ts); ګ, Pashto's own g; and ښ and ږ, which tell you where a speaker is from: in Kandahar they are a hard sh and zh, in the north-east of the Pashto lands closer to kh and g, so the word for Pashto itself is heard as Pashto or Pakhto. Pashto also has three ye's for different vowels: ې (a long e), ۍ (the -ey ending of feminine words) and ئ (the -əi ending of verbs).

Punctuation in both languages points the other way: the comma is ،, the semicolon ؛ and the question mark ؟, and quotations go in guillemets « ». ﷽, "In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful", is written as one character at the top of many letters and documents. To type the letters, add a Pashto or Persian (Dari) keyboard in Windows or Android's Gboard; on an iPhone the Persian keyboard covers Dari. For the full alphabets see the Pashto and Persian collections, and Hazaragi, Uzbek (Arabic), Turkmen and Western Balochi for the country's other languages.

Afghan food emoji: Kabuli palaw, mantu, bolani and chai

Kabuli palaw is the national dish and has no emoji of its own, so people build it: 🍚 for the rice, 🥕 for the slivered carrots and 🍇 for the raisins on top, with 🍖 for the lamb hidden underneath. Afghanistan's grapes and raisins are famous, and so are its melons 🍈 and watermelons 🍉, sold from roadside heaps in summer.

🥟 is mantu, steamed dumplings of spiced minced meat topped with yoghurt and a sauce of meat or split peas, or ashak, their leek-filled cousins; 🥛 stands for the yoghurt and for doogh, the salty yoghurt drink. 🫓 is naan, baked against the wall of a clay tandoor, and also bolani, thin flatbread stuffed with potato or leeks and fried. 🍢 is kebab on skewers from the charcoal grills of every bazaar.

Tea is served all day: 🫖🍵 means a pot of chai, green (chai sabz) or black, often with cardamom and a dish of sweets beside it. For dessert, 🍨 is sheer yakh, Afghan ice cream with rosewater and pistachios, and 🍮 is firni, a soft milk pudding.

Cricket, buzkashi and kites: Afghan sport emoji

🏏 is the emoji of modern Afghan sport. Many of the national team's players learned cricket in refugee camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan became a full member of the International Cricket Council in 2017, and at the 2024 T20 World Cup the team beat Australia and reached the semi-final. 🏏🇦🇫🔥 fills the comments after every win.

🏇🐎🐐 is buzkashi, "goat pulling", the national game of the north: riders on horseback fight to grab a goat carcass and carry it clear of the pack to score, and the best riders, the chapandaz, are local heroes. 🪁 is gudiparan bazi, kite fighting, in which flyers coat their strings with ground glass to cut each other's kites from the sky; it was banned under Taliban rule in the 1990s and became known around the world through Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner.

🥋🥉 recalls Rohullah Nikpai, whose taekwondo bronze medals at Beijing 2008 and London 2012 are Afghanistan's only Olympic medals. ⚽ is played on every patch of open ground, and 🤼 stands for wrestling, a traditional festival sport.

Nowruz, Eid, weddings and the land: more Afghanistan emoji

Nowruz, the new year, falls on 1 Hamal, around 21 March; the months of the Afghan solar calendar are named after the signs of the zodiac. 🌷 is the red tulip of the Mela-e Gul-e Surkh, the red flower festival of Mazar-i-Sharif, and 🌱 is samanak, a sweet pudding of sprouted wheat stirred through the night, which goes on the table beside haft mewa, seven dried fruits and nuts soaked in water. The great Muslim holidays are 🌙🕌: Ramadan and the two Eids, with 🤲 for prayer and 📿 for the tasbih, the prayer beads. The Blue Mosque of Mazar-i-Sharif, tiled in turquoise and blue, is one of the country's best-known buildings.

Weddings are huge, loud and long: 💍 for the couple, 🥁🎶 for the dhol drum and the music, and 🕺💃 for the attan, the circle dance of the Pashtuns that became the national dance, spinning faster and faster as the drum speeds up.

🏔️⛰️ are the Hindu Kush, which cover much of the country and rise to 7,492 m at Noshaq; 🏞️ is Band-e Amir in Bamyan, a chain of deep blue lakes that became the first national park in 2009; 🏜️ the deserts of the south. 🐆 is for the snow leopards of the Wakhan, 🐕 for the Afghan hound, 🐑 for the karakul sheep whose curly fur is used to make the karakul hat, and 🐫⛺ for the Kuchi nomads and their camels and black tents.

💎 is lapis lazuli, mined in Badakhshan for thousands of years; the deep blue stone on Tutankhamun's golden mask is generally thought to have come from there. 🧶 is for the hand-knotted wool carpets of the north, 🏺 for the turquoise-glazed pottery of Istalif and 🧣 for the patu, the wool shawl men wrap around their shoulders. 📜✍️ stand for calligraphy and poetry: Pashto's landay, folk poems of just two lines, and Rumi, called Mawlana Balkhi in Afghanistan after Balkh, his family's city.