Belize Emoji & Symbols

The Belize flag emoji 🇧🇿 shows a royal blue field with a narrow red stripe along the top and bottom edges and a white disc in the middle holding the national coat of arms, ringed by a green wreath of 50 leaves. The flag was raised on independence day, 21 September 1981. The 50 leaves stand for 1950, the year the independence movement began. The blue was the colour of the People's United Party that led that movement; the red stripes, added at independence, are usually read as the colour of the United Democratic Party, so the flag holds both of the country's main parties.

The coat of arms tells how the colony earned its living: two woodcutters stand beside a shield of axes 🪓, a saw 🪚, a paddle and a sailing ship ⛵, under a mahogany tree 🌳, with the motto Sub Umbra Floreo, "under the shade I flourish". Mahogany and logwood 🪵 were the timber the settlement was built on. Belize's is often called the only national flag with people as a main part of its design.

Like every country flag, 🇧🇿 is not a picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 + 🇿, the country code BZ. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows shows the letters BZ instead, but the recipient’s device and app determine whether the flag appears. Belizeans echo it with hearts in its colours, 💙❤️🤍.

Belize national symbols: tapir, toucan, black orchid and mahogany

Belize names a national animal, bird, flower and tree. The Baird's tapir, called the mountain cow in Belize, is the national animal; the keel-billed toucan, with its rainbow beak, is the national bird; the black orchid is the national flower; and the mahogany is the national tree, the one on the flag. Unicode has no tapir, toucan or orchid, so people borrow the nearest emoji: 🦜 for the toucan, 🌳 for the mahogany.

A favourite animal for Belize posts is the jaguar. The Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in the Maya Mountains is often called the world's first jaguar preserve, and the national football team plays as the Jaguars. There is no jaguar emoji either; 🐆 leopard is the closest spotted cat, so it is the one people use for the jaguar.

Belize dollar symbol $ and how to write prices

The currency is the Belize dollar, code BZD. Its sign is the ordinary dollar sign $, and prices are written BZ$ or BZD to keep them apart from US dollars. The Belize dollar is fixed at two to one US dollar, and US notes are accepted almost everywhere, which is why many shops and hotels quote both. 💵 and 🪙 are the emoji people send for cash, and 💲 is the bold dollar emoji.

On a keyboard $ is Shift + 4 on every standard English layout; in HTML it can be written $ or $.

Languages of Belize and the letters you need

Belize is the only country in Central America where English is the official language, a legacy of its years as British Honduras; the country took the name Belize in 1973. CLDR estimates put the population at about 415,000, with some 320,000 who speak English. The language most Belizeans share in the street is Belize Kriol (an estimated 210,000 speakers), an English-based creole written with plain A–Z letters: Weh di go aan? means "What's going on?".

Spanish is spoken by an estimated 230,000 people, especially in the north and west near Mexico and Guatemala, and Belize is Belice in Spanish. It needs the accented vowels Á á É é Í í Ó ó Ú ú, the letter Ñ ñ, Ü ü and the opening marks ¿ ¡: ¡Feliz Día de la Independencia!. The Maya languages Qʼeqchiʼ (an estimated 27,000 speakers), Mopan and Yucatec mark glottal stops with apostrophe-like signs; this page uses ʼ (U+02BC) in Qʼeqchiʼ. Garifuna adds ü and accents of its own, as in Wátina, the title of Andy Palacio's celebrated 2007 album, and Mennonite farming communities speak Plautdietsch. The English, Spanish, Belize Kriol English and Qʼeqchiʼ collections cover each language's letters in full.

To type the Spanish letters on Windows, switch to the US-International layout and press ' then the vowel for á é í ó ú, or use Alt codes: Alt + 0241 for ñ, Alt + 0225 for á, Alt + 0233 for é, Alt + 0191 for ¿ and Alt + 0161 for ¡. On a Mac press Option + E then the vowel for the acute, Option + N then n for ñ, Option + 1 for ¡ and Option + Shift + ? for ¿. On a phone, long-press the letter.

Belize emoji for the reef, the cayes and the rainforest

The Belize Barrier Reef 🪸, part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, is the second-largest barrier reef system in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1996. Snorkellers and divers 🤿 come for its tropical fish 🐠, nurse sharks 🦈, sea turtles 🐢 and dolphins 🐬, and for the Great Blue Hole 🕳️💙 on Lighthouse Reef, a round sinkhole about 300 metres across that Jacques Cousteau made famous in 1971. Fishing guides 🎣 chase bonefish, tarpon and permit on the flats.

The cayes 🏝️ are reached by water taxi 🚤: Ambergris Caye and its town of San Pedro, and Caye Caulker, whose motto is Go Slow 🌴. Lobster season 🦞 opens in June and is celebrated with Lobsterfests on the cayes and in Placencia.

Inland, rainforest 🌿 covers much of the country. Howler monkeys 🐒, called baboons in Kriol, roar at dawn in the Community Baboon Sanctuary; crocodiles 🐊 live in the lagoons, iguanas 🦎 bask on the riverbanks, and the forests hold snakes 🐍, tree frogs 🐸 and blue morpho butterflies 🦋. Maya cities such as Caracol, Xunantunich, Lamanai and Altun Ha rise out of the trees; Unicode has no Maya pyramid, so posts about them lean on 🏞️ and 🌿.

Belizean food, holidays and music in emoji

The dish every Belizean names first is rice and beans 🍚🫘, cooked together in coconut milk 🥥 and served with stewed chicken 🍗, potato salad and fried plantain 🍌. Breakfast is fry jacks with eggs 🍳 and beans; street food means tamales 🫔, panades 🥟 and garnaches and salbutes 🌮 on corn tortillas 🌽. The Garifuna dish hudut is fish simmered in coconut broth 🍲 with mashed plantain, conch 🐚 goes into fritters and soup, and Toledo in the south grows cacao 🍫 on Maya family farms. Every table has a bottle of Marie Sharp's habanero sauce 🌶️, and Belikin beer 🍺 and local rum 🥃 cool things down.

September is the big month: St. George's Caye Day on 10 September marks the 1798 battle against a Spanish fleet, and Independence Day follows on 21 September, so the whole stretch is called the September Celebrations 🎉🎆🎊, with parades, carnival road marches and fireworks. Garifuna Settlement Day, 19 November, re-enacts at dawn in Dangriga the 1832 arrival of Garifuna people in dugout canoes 🛶 to the sound of drums 🥁🪘.

Garifuna language, dance and music were proclaimed a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Punta and punta rock fill the dance floor 💃🕺, Creole brukdown gave Belize Wilfred Peters and his accordion 🪗, and paranda is Garifuna guitar 🎸 music. Football ⚽ is a hugely popular sport, the Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic 🚴 is one of the biggest days of the sporting year, the La Ruta Maya canoe race 🛶 runs down the Belize River, and basketball 🏀 and softball 🥎 have big followings.

Belize City's hand-turned Swing Bridge 🌉 over Haulover Creek is one of its landmarks. After Hurricane Hattie 🌀 wrecked the city in 1961, the capital moved inland to the new town of Belmopan. Neighbours are Mexico 🇲🇽 and Guatemala 🇬🇹, with Honduras 🇭🇳 across the gulf, and large Belizean communities in the United States add 🇧🇿❤️🇺🇸 to their bios.