Armenia Emoji & Symbols

The Armenian flag emoji 🇦🇲 shows the horizontal tricolour of red, blue and orange that Armenia adopted on 24 August 1990, a year before independence. The official reading is that red stands for the Armenian Highland and the people's struggle to survive, blue for the will to live under a peaceful sky, and orange for the creative talent and hard work of the nation.

The emoji is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇦 and 🇲, the country code AM. Phones and Macs join the pair into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the two letters instead, which is why the Armenia flag emoji can appear as AM on a PC. Where the flag will not show, people type the colours: ❤️💙🧡 or 🔴🔵🟠 fills comment sections on match days, on 21 September and in diaspora posts from Los Angeles to Marseille and Moscow.

Armenian symbols and meanings: ֍ eternity, Ararat and the cross

The best-known Armenian symbol is the eternity sign, the arevakhach (sun cross): a wheel of curved spokes turning around a centre, carved on medieval cross-stones and church walls and worn today as pendants, rings and tattoos. Unicode has had it since version 7.0 (2014) in both directions, ֍ right-facing (U+058D, ֍) and ֎ left-facing (U+058E, ֎), so it can be pasted like any letter. Older phones may still show an empty box.

🏔️ is Mount Ararat, where tradition says Noah's Ark came to rest (🕊️ is the dove with the olive branch from the same story). The snow cone towers over the Ararat plain and Yerevan, though it stands across the border in Turkey, and it is drawn with the Ark at the centre of the coat of arms, whose shield is held by an eagle 🦅 and a lion 🦁.

Armenia adopted Christianity as its state religion in 301, traditionally the first country to do so, and ⛪✝️ stand for its churches and monasteries, from Etchmiadzin Cathedral to Geghard and Tatev. There is no separate Armenian cross emoji: the flared, flowering crosses of the khachkars, the carved cross-stones listed by UNESCO, are written with ✝️ or ⛪🪨. 🍑 is the nearest emoji to the apricot, whose Latin name Prunus armeniaca means Armenian plum; 🍇 stands for the vineyards of the Ararat valley and Vayots Dzor.

Armenian letters: the alphabet of Mesrop Mashtots

Armenian is written in its own alphabet, created by the monk Mesrop Mashtots around 405 with 36 letters; Օ օ and Ֆ ֆ were added in the Middle Ages, bringing the total to 38. Armenia's reformed orthography counts the ligature և (yev, the word "and") as a letter too, for 39 letters, from Ա ա (ayb) to Ֆ ֆ (feh). Each letter has a capital and a small form. The ligature և (yev, the word "and") has no capital of its own: at the start of a sentence it is written Եվ, in all capitals ԵՎ. Spelling in Armenia follows the Soviet-era reform; Western Armenian in the diaspora and Armenian in Iran keep the classical spelling.

Armenian punctuation has distinctive marks alongside punctuation also used in other European scripts. The full stop is ։ (verjaket), which looks like a colon; ՝ is the Armenian comma, which functions more like a colon than a comma and marks a pause. The question mark ՞, exclamation mark ՜ and emphasis mark ՛ are written over the stressed vowel of the word they belong to, not at the end of the sentence: Ինչո՞ւ (why?). Quotations use guillemets « » and the hyphen is ֊.

To type Armenian, add an Armenian keyboard: Armenian Phonetic on Windows, one of the Armenian layouts in a Mac's keyboard settings, and the Armenian keyboard on iPhone or in Gboard on Android; the phonetic layouts put Ա on A, Բ on B and so on. Armenian is spoken by about 3 million people in Armenia in CLDR's estimate, and Russian is known by nearly 2 million as a second language; the Yazidis, the largest minority, mostly speak Kurmanji Kurdish. The full alphabet with every letter page is in the Armenian collection, and Cyrillic and Kurdish letters are in the Russian and Kurdish collections.

Armenian dram symbol ֏

Armenia's currency is the dram (AMD), introduced in November 1993; the word simply means money and comes from the same root as the Greek drachma. Its sign ֏ is an Armenian Դ with two horizontal strokes and was added to Unicode in version 6.1 (2012) as U+058F (֏). In Armenia it is written after the amount, 5000 ֏, and many shop signs and receipts use the abbreviation դր. or AMD instead, because ֏ is missing from most keyboards: copy it here.

Armenian food emoji: lavash, khorovats, dolma and brandy

🫓 is lavash, the thin flatbread slapped onto the walls of a tonir, a clay oven set into the ground; its baking is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. It comes to the table with 🧀 white cheese and a big bunch of 🌿 fresh herbs. 🍢🥩🍖 is khorovats, the Armenian barbecue of meat on long skewers, grilled with 🍅 tomatoes, 🍆 aubergines and 🫑 peppers; 🍃 stands for the grape leaves of tolma (dolma), and 🍲 for harissa, the slow-cooked wheat and meat porridge.

🍷🍇 is Armenian wine, whose best-known red grape is the native Areni of Vayots Dzor; 🥃 is Armenian brandy, aged in Yerevan; ☕ is thick Armenian coffee, boiled in a small pot and served in tiny cups. 🍑 apricots, fresh in summer and dried all year, are on the table everywhere.

Holidays, music and sport emoji

On 24 April, Genocide Remembrance Day, people walk up to the memorial at Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan and lay flowers around the eternal flame; online the day is marked with 🕯️🌷 and quiet words rather than party emoji. Independence Day on 21 September brings 🇦🇲🎆 and ❤️💙🧡, and 28 May marks the First Republic of 1918. Christmas is celebrated on 6 January 🎄, Easter with red-dyed eggs 🥚, and New Year's Eve is the biggest family table of the year 🎆.

Trndez in February, the feast of the Presentation, is when couples jump over a bonfire 🔥; Vardavar, fourteen weeks after Easter in high summer, is the day everyone soaks everyone else with buckets and water guns 💦💧.

🪈 is the closest emoji to the duduk, the apricot-wood double-reed instrument whose mellow sound UNESCO lists as heritage; 💃🕺🎶 is kochari and the other circle dances of weddings; 🧶 the wool of Armenian carpets. In sport, ♟️ is a national passion: chess is a school subject, and Armenia won the Chess Olympiad in 2006, 2008 and 2012 🏆. 🤼 Greco-Roman wrestling and 🏋️ weightlifting have brought many of the country's Olympic medals, 🥊 boxing is popular, and ⚽ is followed everywhere.