Azerbaijan Emoji & Symbols

The Azerbaijan flag emoji 🇦🇿 shows three horizontal stripes, blue, red and green, with a white crescent and a white eight-pointed star in the middle. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇦 and 🇿, for the country code AZ; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the letters AZ. Where flags do not display, people write the stripes as 🟦🟥🟩, and the star can be copied on its own as the emoji ✴️ or the plain text star ✷.

The flag was first adopted in 1918 by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and restored in 1991; 9 November is National Flag Day. The usual reading of the colours is blue for Turkic heritage, red for progress and modern democracy, and green for Islam. The eight points of the star are explained in more than one way, most often as the eight branches of the Turkic peoples or as the eight letters of the name Azerbaijan in the Arabic script. 🌙✴️ together is the quickest way to draw the emblem in a chat.

🔥 belongs to Azerbaijan more than to almost any other country. Its nickname is Odlar Yurdu, the Land of Fire: natural gas seeps out of the ground on the Absheron peninsula, and at Yanar Dağ near Baku a gas-fed fire has burned on a hillside for decades, and local legend says far longer. The Atəşgah fire temple at Surakhani was built over such vents, and Baku's skyline is crowned by the three Flame Towers, whose LED skins show moving flames at night (🏙️🔥).

Azerbaijani food emoji: plov 🍚, dolma 🫑 and tea 🫖

🍚 stands for plov, the saffron rice that crowns every feast. The grandest form is şah plov, rice, lamb, dried fruit and chestnuts baked inside a crust of lavash 🫓, which is cut open at the table. Lavash itself, the thin flatbread, is on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, and 🫓 also serves for qutab, thin half-moon flatbreads filled with greens, meat or pumpkin. 🍞 is the round loaf from the clay təndir oven.

Dolma, whose making and sharing UNESCO lists as an Azerbaijani tradition, has two emoji routes: 🍇 for yarpaq dolması, rolled in grape leaves, and 🫑🍆🍅 for üç bacı dolması, the "three sisters": pepper, eggplant and tomato stuffed side by side. 🍖🥩 with 🔥 is kabab from the mangal grill, lülə kabab above all; 🍲 is piti, the mutton and chickpea stew of Sheki cooked in clay pots; 🥟 is düşbərə, dumplings so small that a spoon should hold several; 🥣 is dovğa, warm yoghurt soup with herbs. Add 🌿 for the plate of fresh greens on every table, 🧀 for white cheese, 🥛 for ayran, 🐟 for Caspian fish and its famous sturgeon, 🍎 for the apples of Quba and 🍯 for honey and the syrup of pakhlava and Sheki halva.

Nothing happens without çay. Black tea is poured from a 🫖 teapot into small pear-shaped glasses called armudu (from armud, pear), drunk with a slice of 🍋, sugar cubes or a spoon of fruit jam. 🍵 is the nearest emoji to the glass and ☕ works for any cup; most of the country's own tea grows in the subtropical south around Lankaran. The pomegranate, the fruit Azerbaijanis feel most attached to, has no emoji at all, even though Goychay's autumn pomegranate festival is on UNESCO's list.

Novruz emoji and the holidays of Azerbaijan 🌱🔥🥚

Novruz, the spring New Year at the equinox around 20–21 March, is the biggest holiday of the year. It is prepared for over the four Tuesdays before it, each dedicated to an element: water, fire, wind and earth (💧🔥🌬️🌍). On the evening of the last Tuesday families light small bonfires and jump over them to leave the old year's troubles behind.

🌱 is səməni, wheat sprouts grown on a plate and tied with a red ribbon, the centre of the festive tray called xonça. 🥚 stands for the painted eggs that children knock together to see whose shell survives, 🕯️ for the candles on the tray, 🍬 and 🌰 for the sweets and nuts heaped around them: diamond-shaped pakhlava, crescent-shaped şəkərbura and round şorqoğal. The greeting is Novruz bayramınız mübarək!

During Ramadan and at Qurban Bayramı people send 🌙 and 🕌: most Azerbaijanis are Muslim, a majority of them Shia, in a constitutionally secular state. The national days are 28 May, Independence Day, marking the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918, and 18 October, when independence was restored in 1991; 🇦🇿 with 🎆 or ❤️ is the usual message.

Azerbaijan emoji for places: Baku, the Caspian and the Caucasus

🏰 is the walled Old City of Baku, İçərişəhər, with the Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 🌊 is the Caspian Sea along Baku Boulevard, and 🌬️ is the wind that gives Baku its nickname, the City of Winds: the cold northern xəzri and the warm southern gilavar. 🛢️ is oil, which made Baku a boom town in the 19th century; the well drilled at Bibi-Heybat in 1846 is often cited as the world's first drilled oil well.

🪨 points to Gobustan, where thousands of rock carvings of hunters, boats and dancers cover the cliffs, and 🌋 to its mud volcanoes, which bubble cold grey mud; Azerbaijan is often said to have more of them than any other country. 🏔️ is the Greater Caucasus: Shahdag's ski slopes, Bazardüzü at 4,466 m, the highest peak, and the mountain village of Khinalug, where 🐑 flocks still walk the old seasonal routes. 🌳 is the Hyrcanian forest of the south, also on the World Heritage list.

Faith in the country is old and varied. 🕌 is the mosque, from Bibi-Heybat to Taza Pir in Baku. ⛪ fits the stone church at Kish near Sheki, linked to Caucasian Albania and often called one of the oldest Christian sites in the Caucasus. 🕍 belongs to Qırmızı Qəsəbə, the Red Village near Quba, a town of Mountain Jews that is often described as one of the few all-Jewish towns outside Israel.

Carpets, music and sport: 🧶 🎻 ♟️ ⚽

There is no carpet emoji, so 🧶 and 🧵 stand in for the Azerbaijani carpet, whose weaving UNESCO lists as intangible heritage; Baku has a Carpet Museum shaped like a rolled-up rug. 🧵 also fits the silk of Sheki, and 🧣 is the kəlağayı, the square silk headscarf, block-printed and also on UNESCO's list. 🧿 is the blue eye bead, göz muncuğu, hung against the evil eye.

🎶 is mugham, the classical modal music sung to a trio of tar, kamancha and daf. The tar, a long-necked lute, has no emoji; 🎻 serves for the kamancha, a spike fiddle, 🪈 for the balaban, 🥁 for the naghara drum and 🪗 for the qarmon accordion that drives wedding dances. 🎤 recalls 2011, when Ell & Nikki won Eurovision with "Running Scared" and Baku hosted the contest the next year.

♟️ is a serious national sport: Garry Kasparov was born in Baku, and grandmasters such as Teimour Radjabov and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov followed; Baku hosted the 2016 Chess Olympiad and the Chess World Cup in 2015 and 2023. 🤼 🥋 🥊 are the Olympic medal sports, wrestling, judo and boxing. ⚽ fills the Baku Olympic Stadium, which held the 2019 Europa League final and Euro 2020 matches, and 🏎️ is the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a street race that squeezes past the Old City walls. 🐎🏇 is the Karabakh horse and çövkən, polo played on it, which UNESCO lists as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.

Azerbaijani letters and the manat sign ₼: how to type them

Azerbaijani is written in a 32-letter Latin alphabet, adopted in 1991 after Cyrillic (1939–1991), an earlier Latin alphabet (1929–1939) and the Arabic script before that. Beyond A–Z it uses Ç ç, Ə ə, Ğ ğ, İ i with ı, Ö ö, Ş ş and Ü ü, and it has no W. Ə sounds like the a in English "cat" and appears in the country's own name, Azərbaycan; the 1991 alphabet first used Ä for it, and Ə replaced it in 1992. Ç is the ch in "church", Ş the sh in "ship", C the j in "jam", Q a hard g, X the throaty ch of German "Bach", Ğ a soft voiced version of it, and Ö and Ü are said as in German. Like Turkish, Azerbaijani has two i's: dotted İ i and dotless I ı, as in Bakı (Baku); the capital of i is İ, so İlham and İsmayıllı keep their dot.

Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android all offer an Azerbaijani keyboard layout, which puts every letter on its own key. Without it, Windows Alt codes cover Ç (Alt+0199), ç (Alt+0231), Ö (Alt+0214), ö (Alt+0246), Ü (Alt+0220) and ü (Alt+0252); on a Mac, Option+C gives ç and Option+U followed by a vowel adds the two dots. In HTML, Ə is Ə, ə ə, Ğ Ğ, ğ ğ, İ İ, ı ı, Ş Ş and ş ş. Watch the look-alikes: the Azerbaijani capital Ə is U+018F, not the reversed Ǝ (U+018E) used in other languages or the Cyrillic Ә.

₼ is the manat sign, U+20BC, added to Unicode in 2014. One manat is 100 qəpik, the code is AZN, and prices are usually written with the sign after the number: 25 ₼. The current manat was introduced in 2006, worth 5,000 old manats. In Word you can type 20bc and press Alt+X; anywhere else, copy ₼ from the grid above.

Azerbaijan has about 10.7 million people by CLDR estimates, and Azerbaijani is spoken by nearly all of them. Older texts and some readers still use Cyrillic, covered in the Azerbaijani (Cyrillic) collection; Talysh is spoken in the south around Lankaran, and there is a small Kurdish community. The full alphabet is in the Azerbaijani collection, and Turkish, which shares Ç Ğ I İ Ö Ş Ü, has its own, as do the neighbours Türkiye, Georgia, Iran and Russia.