Bahrain Emoji

🇧🇭 the Bahrain flag emoji is red with a white band along the side nearest the pole, and the two colours meet in a zigzag of five white points. Like every country flag emoji it is not a picture stored in Unicode but two invisible regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇭, for Bahrain's country code BH, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters BH, while the person you send them to still sees the flag on their phone.

The five points stand for the Five Pillars of Islam; the number was fixed at five in 2002, and older versions of the flag had more. The white band goes back to the early 19th century, when the Gulf rulers who signed a maritime treaty with Britain added white to their plain red flags. Where flag emoji don't show, people write the flag in its colours, 🤍❤️, ⬜🟥 or ⚪🔴, white first, the way the flag reads from the pole.

👑 is for the kingdom, which Bahrain has been since 2002, and 🏝️🌊 for the islands: Bahrain is an archipelago of more than thirty islands, and its name is Arabic for "two seas". By CLDR's estimate about 1.6 million people live there.

Bahrain flag vs Qatar flag: 🇧🇭 or 🇶🇦?

The most common mix-up in this collection: 🇧🇭 and 🇶🇦 look alike because both come from the same family of red-and-white Gulf flags. Bahrain's is bright red with five white points; Qatar's is a dark maroon with nine points and is noticeably longer. At emoji size the colour is the quickest tell, Bahrain red and Qatar brownish maroon, and if your screen shows letters instead of flags, BH is Bahrain and QA is Qatar.

The neighbours each have their own collection: Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, joined to Bahrain by the causeway, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.

Bahraini dinar symbol: BD, BHD and د.ب

The Bahraini dinar has no currency sign of its own in Unicode. Prices are written BD in English (BD 5), BHD in banking, and د.ب in Arabic: dal and ba, short for دينار بحريني (Bahraini dinar), with a full stop between them. To write it, copy د and ب from the grid and put a full stop between them; because Arabic runs right to left, د ends up on the right.

The dinar was introduced in 1965 and is divided into 1,000 fils 🪙, so prices often have three decimals: BD 1.500 is one and a half dinars. It is pegged to the US dollar at about 2.66 dollars to the dinar, which makes it one of the most valuable currency units in the world, second only to the Kuwaiti dinar. 💰 and 💵 are the money emoji people put next to it.

Arabic letters and numbers for Bahrain

Arabic is Bahrain's official language and, by CLDR's estimate, the language of roughly 1.4 million of its people. At home most Bahrainis speak Bahraini Arabic, but they write Modern Standard Arabic in the Arabic script: 28 letters, written right to left and joined to each other, so a letter changes shape at the start, middle and end of a word. The grid groups the letters by shape: ب ت ث share one body and differ only in their dots, and so do ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ. Hamza ء marks a glottal stop, ة (ta marbuta) ends most feminine words, and ى (alif maqsura) ends words like على. Paste ب ح ر ي ن one after another and they join into بحرين; with the article ال in front, البحرين is Bahrain in Arabic.

To type Arabic on Windows, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language › Language & region and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add Arabic under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on iPhone and Android add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. Arabic punctuation is turned to suit the script: the comma ، is upside down, the question mark ؟ is mirrored, and the semicolon is ؛. Eastern Arabic digits ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ are common in Arabic text and on banknotes, and even inside right-to-left text a number is written largest place first, left to right: ١٦ is 16.

For the full alphabet with its vowel marks see the Arabic collection. English is widely used in business and shops, and Bahrain's large community from Kerala also writes Malayalam, spoken there by an estimated 50,000 people, which has its own collection.

Bahrain emoji for pearls, food and places

Before oil, Bahrain lived from pearls 🦪. Divers sailed out on wooden dhows ⛵ for months every summer, and the sea songs called fijiri, sung with drums 🥁, clay pots and hand-clapping, come from those boats. The pearling trail in Muharraq, with its merchants' houses and offshore oyster beds, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012.

Machboos is the national dish: rice 🍚🍛 cooked with spices, dried black lime 🍋‍🟩 (loomi) and chicken 🍗, lamb or fish 🐟. Muhammar is sweet rice with sugar or date syrup, traditionally eaten with fish. Shrimp 🦐 and hamour come from the Gulf; shawarma 🥙 and falafel 🧆 are everyday street food, and regag 🫓 is the paper-thin bread made on a hot plate at street stalls. Coffee ☕ here means gahwa, light Arabic coffee with cardamom, poured into small cups and served with dates 🌴, and karak 🍵 is the sweet spiced milk tea sold everywhere. 🍮 stands in for Bahraini halwa, a glossy sweet flavoured with saffron, cardamom and rose water and topped with nuts.

🕌 is the Al Fateh Grand Mosque in Manama, one of the largest mosques in the world. 🏰 stands for Qal'at al-Bahrain, the Bahrain Fort, built on a mound people lived on for more than 4,000 years and a UNESCO site since 2005, and 🏺 for Dilmun, the ancient civilization whose burial mounds cover parts of the north of the main island (UNESCO, 2019). 🌳 is the Tree of Life, a lone mesquite about 400 years old growing in the desert with no obvious source of water. 🌉 is the King Fahd Causeway to Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, about 25 km of bridges and embankments opened in 1986, and 🏙️🌬️ the Manama skyline with the Bahrain World Trade Center, whose two towers carry three wind turbines between them. 🛢️ marks oil: in 1932 Bahrain struck the first oil on the Arab side of the Gulf. 🐪 🐎 and 🦅 are the camels, Arabian horses and falcons of Gulf tradition.

Bahrain National Day, Ramadan and F1 emoji

Bahrain National Day is celebrated on 16 and 17 December: streets, cars and balconies turn red and white, fireworks 🎆 go up, and posts read 🇧🇭❤️🤍🎆 with عيد وطني سعيد (Happy National Day). Independence from Britain itself came in August 1971.

In Ramadan 🌙, the middle of the month brings Gergaoon, when children in traditional clothes go from house to house singing and collecting nuts 🥜 and sweets 🍬 in cloth bags. Eid greetings are عيد مبارك (Eid Mubarak) with 🌙🤲, 📿 is the misbaha prayer beads you'll see in many hands, and 🐑 belongs to Eid al-Adha.

The Bahrain Grand Prix at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir was the first Formula 1 race in the Middle East, in 2004, and it now runs at night under floodlights 🏎️🏁. The national football team won its first Arabian Gulf Cup in 2019 and won it again in the 2024–25 edition ⚽🏆, and horse racing 🏇 at Sakhir completes the sports emoji. In summer the temperature regularly passes 40 °C, which is what ☀️🥵 is for.