Benin Emoji

🇧🇯 the Benin flag emoji shows a green vertical band at the hoist and two horizontal bands, yellow over red. Like every flag emoji it is not a picture in the text but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇯, for Benin's country code BJ, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you'll see the letters BJ, while the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone. In Nigeria and across West Africa the country is often called Benin Republic, and "Benin Republic flag emoji" is the same 🇧🇯.

The flag was adopted in 1959, just before independence from France on 1 August 1960, when the country was still called Dahomey. From 1975, when it became the People's Republic of Benin, it used a plain green flag with a red star in the corner; that is the "old Benin flag with a star" people search for. The green, yellow and red flag came back on 1 August 1990, when the country left one-party rule behind. Green is usually explained as hope and renewal, yellow as the country's wealth and red as the courage of its ancestors. Where flags don't show, people write 💚💛❤️ or 🟩🟨🟥.

The same three pan-African colours are on the flag of Togo 🇹🇬, Benin's western neighbour, so the two are easy to mix up: Togo has green and yellow stripes and a red square with a white star, Benin a single green band and two wide stripes. 🇧🇯🤝🇹🇬 and 🇧🇯🤝🇳🇬 are the usual way to greet the neighbours.

Benin national symbols: leopards, kings and the Kingdom of Dahomey

Benin's coat of arms has two leopards 🐆 holding up a shield that shows a Somba fortified house, the Star of Benin ⭐, a palm tree 🌴 and a sailing ship ⛵. Above it two horns hold ears of maize, and the motto below reads Fraternité, Justice, Travail, brotherhood, justice, work. The leopard runs deep here: Dahomey oral tradition links its royal dynasty to a leopard, and the national football team is now the Guépards, the Cheetahs, for which 🐆 is the nearest emoji.

The Kingdom of Dahomey ruled from Abomey from the 1600s until the French conquest in the 1890s, and its Royal Palaces are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Each king had an emblem, still sewn on the bright appliqué cloths 🧵 of Abomey and modelled in the palace walls: Ghézo the buffalo 🐃, Glèlè the lion 🦁, and Béhanzin, who fought the French, the shark 🦈. 👑🦈 is Béhanzin to anyone who grew up in Benin. ⚔️ stands for the Agojie, Dahomey's regiment of women soldiers, known to Europeans as the Dahomey Amazons and to film audiences from The Woman King (2022); a giant statue of an Agojie warrior was unveiled in Cotonou in 2022.

A note for people searching "Benin symbols": the famous Benin Bronzes, the ivory Queen Idia mask and the Edo royal symbols come from the Kingdom of Benin, whose capital is Benin City in Nigeria 🇳🇬. The Republic of Benin is a different place; when Dahomey was renamed in 1975 it took the name from the Bight of Benin, the bay its coast lies on. For the Edo kingdom, see the Nigeria collection.

Vodun Days, Ouidah and Benin holidays in emoji

Benin is the cradle of Vodun, the religion of spirits and ancestors that travelled with enslaved people to Haiti, Brazil and Louisiana, and it has an annual national holiday for traditional religions, now held on the second Friday of January. During Vodun Days in January, Ouidah fills with drummers 🥁🪘, dancers, priests and pilgrims for what is now promoted as Vodun Days; 🐍🥁🎭 is the caption of the day. 🐍 is for Dangbé, the python spirit, whose temple in Ouidah houses dozens of royal pythons that are left to roam the town. 🎭 stands for the masquerades: Egungun, the costumed spirits of the ancestors, and Zangbeto, the guardians of the night in their tall raffia costumes. 🙏 closes prayers in every faith. The pin-stuck doll is an older folk-magic image later turned into a Voodoo stereotype, not a standard Vodun practice.

Ouidah was also one of the busiest slave-trade ports on the coast. The Route des Esclaves runs from the town to the beach, where a memorial arch, the Door of No Return 🚪, faces the sea; people post it quietly, with 🕊️ or nothing at all.

Independence Day on 1 August is 🇧🇯🎉🎆 with "Bonne fête de l'indépendance". About half the country is Christian and a quarter Muslim, so Christmas 🎄⛪ and Tabaski 🐏🌙🕌, as Eid al-Adha is called in West Africa, are both big family days, "Bonne fête de Tabaski". In the north the Bariba celebrate the Gaani in Nikki with parades of richly dressed horsemen 🐎.

CFA franc symbol: how to write Benin's currency

Benin pays in the West African CFA franc, ISO code XOF, issued by the BCEAO, the central bank shared with Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. There is no special CFA franc symbol in Unicode, and none on banknotes: prices are written with the letters F CFA or FCFA after the number, French style, with a space between thousands, as in 5 000 F CFA, or just 5 000 F on a market sign. The franc sign ₣ is the old French franc's and is not used for the CFA.

The CFA franc is pegged to the euro at 655.957 francs to €1, which is why prices look large to visitors. 💰 and 🪙 are the money emoji people send; there are no centimes in daily use.

Fon, Yoruba and French letters to copy and paste

French is the official language, spoken by roughly 5 million people by CLDR estimates, but most people grow up speaking one of dozens of national languages. The largest is Fon, about 3.7 million speakers, one of the Gbe languages with Gun, Aja and Ewe; then Yoruba, about 1 million in Benin, where its speakers are often called Nago, and Bariba, Dendi and Fulfulde in the north. Benin's national alphabet specifies separate alphabets for each language; Fon uses Ɖ ɖ, a d sound distinct from plain d, and Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ, open e and o sounds. The language's own name shows two of them: Fɔngbè. Fon also writes double consonants such as gb and kp, both sounds made at once, as in Gbe itself.

Yoruba spelling is one of the differences you notice crossing the border: in Benin it uses ɛ and ɔ where Nigeria writes ẹ and ọ. Both languages are tonal, and tone is marked with an acute for a high tone and a grave for a low one, often left out in everyday writing. For ɛ or ɔ with a tone, type the letter and then the combining accent from the grid: ɔ followed by ́ gives ɔ́.

On a computer, Microsoft Word types any of them if you enter the code and press Alt+X: 0189 for Ɖ, 0256 for ɖ, 0190 for Ɛ, 025B for ɛ, 0186 for Ɔ and 0254 for ɔ; on a Mac add the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and hold Option while typing the same codes. In HTML they are ɖ (ɖ), ɛ (ɛ) and ɔ (ɔ). Watch the look-alikes: Ɖ looks exactly like the Croatian and Vietnamese Đ, but its small letter is ɖ, not đ, and ɛ is not the Greek ε. Keyboards sold in Benin are French AZERTY, which have é è à ç ù on their own keys; ê, â, î, ô and û come from the ^ dead key, and French quotes are « » with a space inside, « comme ça ». See the Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and French collections for the full alphabets.

Food, places and football: everyday Benin emoji

Maize 🌽 is the base of the south's meals: white pâte eaten with a sauce, sour akassa, and amiwo, a red maize paste cooked in tomato 🍅 and pepper 🌶️, usually with chicken 🍗. 🍠 stands in for pounded yam, the pride of the north, 🍲🥘 the sauce pots, peanut sauce 🥜 among them, and 🥜 also covers kluiklui, the crunchy peanut snack sold by the roadside. 🍚🫘 is rice and beans, 🍌 fried plantain, 🥣 gari. 🧀 is wagashi, the soft cheese the Fulani make in the north, often with a red rind. Benin is known for its sweet pineapples 🍍 and mangoes 🥭; to drink there is sorghum beer in the north 🍺 and sodabi, a strong spirit distilled from palm wine 🥃🌴.

🏙️ is Cotonou, the largest city and seat of government (the official capital is Porto-Novo), 🏍️ its zémidjan motorbike taxis, whose drivers in Cotonou wear yellow shirts, 🧺 the great Dantokpa market, and 🚢 the port that also serves Niger and Burkina Faso. 🛶🏘️ is Ganvié, a town of stilt houses on Lake Nokoué where people go everywhere by pirogue; the story goes that it was founded by people escaping slave raiders who would not follow them onto the water. 🏖️🌊🥥 is the coast at Ouidah and Grand-Popo, 🛖 the tata somba, the fortified earth houses of the Atakora hills, and 🏞️🐘🦁🦛🐊 the Pendjari and W national parks in the north.

Music: 🎤 for Angélique Kidjo, born in Ouidah and a multiple Grammy winner, 🎷🎺 for the brass of the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, which mixed Vodun rhythms with funk in the 1970s, and 💃🕺 for the dancing. 🎨 is the art scene of Cotonou and Porto-Novo. Football: ⚽🐆🇧🇯 cheers the Guépards, who were called the Écureuils, the Squirrels 🐿️, until a few years ago and reached the quarter-finals of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations after beating Morocco on penalties. 🗳️🕊️ recalls the 1990 National Conference and the 1991 election, in which a sitting president was voted out peacefully, one of the first times this happened in Africa.