Belgium Emoji & Symbols

The Belgium flag emoji 🇧🇪 shows three vertical bands, black, yellow and red. The colours come from the arms of the old Duchy of Brabant, a gold lion on a black shield with red claws and tongue, and the vertical layout has been used since 1831. The official flag is almost square (13:15), but the emoji is drawn in the usual flag shape.

Like every country flag, 🇧🇪 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 + 🇪, the country code BE. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so the same emoji shows up there as the letters BE. Copy it anyway: whoever receives it on a phone sees the flag.

Don't mix it up with Germany 🇩🇪, which has the same black and red but in horizontal stripes and with gold. If you need the colours without the flag, 🖤💛❤️ hearts or ⬛🟨🟥 squares rebuild it in any app, and the 🇪🇺 EU flag fits naturally next to it: Brussels is home to the European Commission and the Council of the EU, as well as NATO's headquarters.

Belgium emoji meanings: fries, waffles, chocolate and beer

🍟 Fries are a national institution. Belgians call them frieten or frites, fry them twice, and buy them from a frietkot or friterie in a paper cone with mayonnaise. With a pot of mussels they make moules-frites; there is no mussel emoji, so people use 🦪 or 🍲. 🍲 also stands for stoofvlees (carbonade flamande), beef stewed in beer, and Ghent's waterzooi.

🧇 Waffles come in two Belgian kinds: the light, rectangular Brussels waffle and the dense, caramelised Liège waffle made with pearl sugar. 🍫 Chocolate means pralines, filled chocolates first made in Brussels by Jean Neuhaus in 1912, and 🍪 stands in for speculoos, the spiced caramel biscuit served with coffee. 🦐 is the small grey North Sea shrimp of tomate-crevette and shrimp croquettes, and 🥬 covers two vegetables named after the country: Brussels sprouts and Belgian endive (witloof or chicon).

🍺 🍻 Beer may be the most Belgian emoji of all: Belgian beer culture is on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, and the country brews hundreds of beers, from Trappist ales made by monks at abbeys such as Westmalle, Chimay, Orval and Rochefort to lambic and gueuze. Cheers is Santé! in French and Schol! in Flemish. 🥃 is for jenever, the juniper spirit of Hasselt, which Liège drinks as peket.

Belgian and regional emblems: the lion, rooster and iris

🦁 The lion is Belgium's national animal. It stands on the royal coat of arms, and the black lion on yellow is the flag of Flanders, celebrated on 11 July in memory of the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302). 🐓 The rooster is the emblem of Wallonia, whose flag shows a red rooster on yellow and whose festival falls in September. Brussels uses a yellow iris on blue, which has no emoji.

👑 stands for the monarchy: Belgium is a kingdom, ruled by King Philippe since 2013, and its National Day on 21 July marks the day in 1831 when Leopold I swore the oath as the first King of the Belgians. People celebrate with 🇧🇪🎆, with fireworks and a military parade in Brussels.

Belgium has three official languages and three communities: Dutch in Flanders, French in Wallonia, both in Brussels, and German in the small German-speaking Community in the east around Eupen and Sankt Vith. Regional languages such as West Flemish and Walloon are spoken too. CLDR estimates, which also count people who speak a language as a second language, put Dutch at about 6.6 million speakers, French at about 4.6 million and German at about 2.6 million, in a country of about 12 million.

How to type Belgian letters and the euro sign € (België, Liège, ç)

The country's own name needs an accent: in Dutch it is België, with a trema (diaeresis) on ë to show that the e starts a new syllable, Bel-gi-ë. Dutch also uses é to stress a word, as in één (one) against een (a), and ó in vóór (before). French in Belgium writes é è ê à ç ô û and œ, as in Liège, which was officially spelled Liége until 1946, and sœur; German speakers in the east use ä ö ü and ß; and Walloon spelling uses å. Dutch ij is written with the two letters i and j.

Most Belgians, in Flanders as well as Wallonia, type on the Belgian AZERTY keyboard, which has keys for é è à ç ù and dead keys ^ and ¨ for ê ë ï ü. On a US keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0232 for è, 0235 for ë, 0231 for ç, 0156 for œ or 0128 for € on the number pad. On a Mac, Option + E then the letter gives é, Option + U then the letter gives ë or ü, Option + ` then e gives è, Option + C gives ç and Option + Shift + 2 gives €. On phones, long-press the letter or the $ key. In HTML, use ë, é, ç and €.

Belgium has used the euro € since 1999, with notes and coins 💶 since 2002, when it replaced the Belgian franc (BEF). Belgian euro coins show the king. In French the sign usually goes after the amount with a space, 4,50 €; in Dutch it usually goes before the amount with a space, € 4,50, and both use a decimal comma; « » guillemets are the French quotation marks, and the language pages for Dutch, French and German list every letter of each alphabet.

Belgian culture in emoji: comics, art, music and sport

Belgium is a comic-strip country 💬: Tintin (Hergé), the Smurfs (Peyo) and Lucky Luke were all created by Belgian artists, and Brussels has painted comic murals on its walls. For art, 🎨 🖼️ cover the Flemish masters, from Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece to Bruegel and Rubens in Antwerp, and 🎩 is René Magritte's bowler-hatted man; 🎩🍏 recalls his Son of Man.

🎷 The saxophone was invented by a Belgian, Adolphe Sax of Dinant, and patented in 1846. 🎤 belongs to Jacques Brel, Stromae and Angèle, and 🎧🪩 to Tomorrowland, the dance music festival held every summer in Boom near Antwerp.

In sport, ⚽ means the national football team, the Red Devils (Rode Duivels, Diables Rouges), so 🇧🇪⚽😈 is the match-day combo. 🚴 🚲 are almost a religion: Eddy Merckx won the Tour de France five times, and the spring classics, the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the oldest of them, draw huge crowds. 🏑 is for the Red Lions, Olympic field hockey champions at the Tokyo Games, 🎾 for Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin, both world number ones, and 🏎️ for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps.

Belgian places, festivals and holidays in emoji

🏰 is for Belgium's many castles, such as the Gravensteen in Ghent; ⛪ and 🔔 for the Gothic churches and belfries of Bruges, Ghent and Mechelen; 🏛️ for the grand public buildings of Brussels and the EU institutions. There is no emoji for the Atomium or Manneken Pis, so people simply name them. 💎🚢⚓ is Antwerp, for centuries one of the world's great diamond centres and one of Europe's largest ports, and 🌲🐗 is the Ardennes, whose wild boar is the region's emblem.

In everyday life, 🚆 stands for one of Europe's densest rail networks and 🚋 for the Coast Tram. 🐴 recalls the shrimp fishermen of Oostduinkerke, who still fish on horseback, a tradition on UNESCO's list, and Belgium's heavy draught horses. 🐕 is often the Belgian Malinois, a shepherd dog named after Mechelen (Malines in French) that works with police and armies around the world.

🎭🪶🍊 is the Carnival of Binche, on UNESCO's heritage list: on Shrove Tuesday the Gilles wear wax masks in the morning; in the afternoon they don tall ostrich-feather hats and throw oranges to the crowd. 🐉 is the Doudou in Mons, where Saint George fights the dragon in the Lumeçon, and 🐈 the Kattenstoet in Ypres, a cat parade every three years that ends with toy cats thrown from the belfry. 🔔 stands for the belfries and carillons of Flemish and Walloon towns; 33 Belgian belfries are part of UNESCO's Belfries of Belgium and France site.

🎅🎁🍊 in Belgium usually means Sinterklaas or Saint-Nicolas on 6 December, the big gift day for children; there is no bishop emoji, so the Santa face stands in. At Easter, Belgian children are told the church bells fly to Rome and drop eggs on the way back: 🔔🥚🍫. And 🇧🇪🎆 is National Day on 21 July.