Bahamas Emoji & Symbols

The Bahamas flag emoji 🇧🇸 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, B and S (the country's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, this one among them, arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters BS instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was raised on 10 July 1973, the day the Bahamas became independent from Britain. It has three horizontal stripes, aquamarine, gold and aquamarine, and a black equilateral triangle at the hoist. The government's own reading: aquamarine for the sea around the islands, gold for the sun and the sand, and black for the vigour and strength of a united people, with the triangle pointing toward the fly as their determination to develop the land and the sea. There is no triangle emoji in the flag's shape, so people paste the colours as hearts 🩵💛🖤, and ► is the nearest text character to the triangle.

Bahamas national symbols: flamingo, yellow elder, marlin and conch

🦩 Flamingo is the national bird. Great Inagua, the southernmost large island, is home to one of the biggest breeding colonies of Caribbean flamingos in the world, protected in Inagua National Park. 🌼 stands in for the yellow elder, the national flower, a shrub with bright yellow trumpet flowers. The national fish is the blue marlin; there is no marlin emoji, so 🐟 does the job. The national tree, the lignum vitae, has no emoji at all.

The coat of arms puts most of these together: a shield held by a marlin and a flamingo, a ship on the shield (Columbus's Santa María), a rising sun, and a 🐚 conch shell on top, with the motto Forward, Upward, Onward Together. Conch is everywhere in the Bahamas: on the coat of arms, on the dinner table, and in pink shells piled on the docks. The national anthem is March On, Bahamaland.

Junkanoo emoji 🎭🥁🔔 and the holidays of the Bahamas

Junkanoo is the great Bahamian festival: in the early hours of Boxing Day (26 December) and New Year's Day, groups in huge costumes of crepe paper on cardboard frames "rush" down Bay Street in Nassau and through towns on the other islands, competing for prizes. The music is goatskin drums 🥁, cowbells 🔔, whistles and horns 🎺🪊, so the emoji people send is a string of 🎭🥁🔔🎺💃 with 🇧🇸. Groups spend most of the year building their costumes 🪶 in secret.

Independence Day on 10 July brings 🇧🇸🎆🎇. Majority Rule Day on 10 January remembers the 1967 election that brought the Black majority into government (🗳️), and Emancipation Day, the first Monday of August, marks the end of slavery in 1834 (⛓️‍💥). Christmas 🎄 runs straight into Junkanoo.

The other sound of the islands is rake 'n' scrape: a carpenter's saw 🪚 bent and scraped with a knife or screwdriver, a goatskin drum and often an accordion 🪗. It is especially tied to Cat Island, which holds a rake 'n' scrape festival.

Beaches, swimming pigs and blue holes

The Bahamas is about 700 islands and more than 2,000 cays spread over a shallow, very clear sea, so 🏝️🏖️☀️🌊 and 🌅 are popular Bahamas emoji alongside the flag. 🩷 is for the pink sand of Harbour Island, off Eleuthera, coloured by tiny pink shells of marine organisms called foraminifera.

🐷 The swimming pigs of Big Major Cay in the Exumas, known as Pig Beach, paddle out to meet boats, and 🐷🌊🏝️ is a popular caption for that trip. Below the surface come 🐢 sea turtles, 🐠 reef fish, 🦈 sharks, 🐬 dolphins and 🪸 the Andros barrier reef. 🕳️ is for the blue holes: Dean's Blue Hole on Long Island, about 200 metres deep, hosts the Vertical Blue free-diving competition 🤿.

On land, 🦜 is the Bahama parrot of Abaco and Inagua, which on Abaco nests in holes in the limestone ground, and 🦎 covers the rare rock iguanas of the cays. 🌺 hibiscus and 🥥 coconut palms grow everywhere.

Bahamian food emoji: conch, crawfish and peas 'n' rice

Conch 🐚 comes cracked (pounded and fried), in fritters, and above all as conch salad: raw conch diced with onion, tomato and peppers 🌶️ (the hot local goat pepper) and soaked in lime 🍋‍🟩 and orange juice, made to order at the stands of Arawak Cay and Potter's Cay in Nassau. 🦞 is the Bahamian crawfish, the spiny lobster, and 🦀 the land crabs of Andros, which has a crab festival every summer.

🍚🫘 Peas 'n' rice (rice cooked with pigeon peas) comes with almost every meal; 🍞 is johnnycake, the dense bread eaten with boil fish 🐟 for breakfast; 🍲 is for chicken souse and stew fish. Eleuthera holds a pineapple festival 🍍, and 🍌🥭 grow in yards. To drink: 🍺 Kalik, the local beer, 🥃 rum, 🍹 a Goombay Smash or Bahama Mama, and 🥥🍸 Sky Juice, gin with coconut water and sweet condensed milk.

Bahamas dollar symbol $ and how to type it

The Bahamas' currency is the Bahamian dollar (code BSD), divided into 100 cents and pegged one to one to the US dollar, which is accepted almost everywhere on the islands. Prices are written with the ordinary dollar sign $, or B$ when it must be clear which dollar is meant. The cent sign is ¢, and 💵🪙💲 are the money emoji.

On a US keyboard, type $ with Shift + 4. For ¢: on Windows hold Alt and type 0162 on the number pad; on a Mac press Option + 4; in HTML write ¢. Bahamian money has its own quirks: a three-dollar note, and a square 15-cent coin with a hibiscus on it.