Cameroon Emoji

🇨🇲 the Cameroon flag emoji shows three vertical bands, green, red and yellow, with a yellow five-pointed star in the middle of the red. Like every flag emoji it is not a picture stored in the text but two regional indicator symbols, 🇨 and 🇲, for Cameroon's country code CM; phones and Macs join them into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters CM instead, but the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone.

The colours are the pan-African ones. Green is usually explained as the forests of the south, yellow as the sun and savanna of the north, and red as the unity that joins them; the star is called the star of unity. The flag has changed twice: it had no star when it was adopted in 1957 and flown at independence in 1960, two yellow stars from 1961, when the former British Southern Cameroons joined in a federation, and a single star in the red band since May 1975. Where flags don't show, people write it as 💚❤️💛 or 🟩🟥🟨, and those hearts fill every match chat and National Day post.

The lion 🦁 is the animal everyone links with Cameroon, mostly through the national football teams, the Indomitable Lions and the Indomitable Lionesses. The coat of arms supplies ⚖️: its shield, in the flag's colours, carries the map of Cameroon, the yellow star and the scales of justice, with two crossed fasces behind it and the motto Paix – Travail – Patrie, Peace – Work – Fatherland, in French and English. 🌍 fits too: with rainforest, beaches, volcanoes, savanna and more than 250 languages, Cameroon is often called Africa in miniature.

CFA franc symbol: how Cameroon writes money

Cameroon pays in the Central African CFA franc, code XAF, issued by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), which has its headquarters in Yaoundé. Five other countries share it: the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. Its rate is fixed to the euro at 655.957 francs per euro.

There is no Unicode sign for the CFA franc. Prices are written with the letters after the number, French style: 2 500 FCFA or 2 500 F CFA, and banks write XAF 2,500. The ₣ you may find in symbol tables is the old French franc sign and is not used for CFA prices. For money in a chat, 💰 and 💸 do the job.

French accents and Cameroonian letters to copy and paste

Cameroon has two official languages. CLDR estimates 21 million literate, functional users of French and 12 million of English (within a total population of about 31 million); English is strongest in the Northwest and Southwest regions, where Cameroonian Pidgin is the everyday common language, and young people in the cities mix both in Camfranglais. French needs its accents even in place names: Yaoundé, Ngaoundéré, fête, garçon. On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys; on a US keyboard in Windows type Alt+0233 for é, Alt+0232 for è, Alt+0224 for à, Alt+0231 for ç and Alt+0244 for ô; on a Mac press Option+E then the letter for é, Option+` for è, Option+I for ê and ô, and Option+C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The French collection has the whole alphabet.

Most of Cameroon's own languages are written with the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, agreed in 1979. It adds ɛ (an open e, as in "bed"), ɔ (an open o, as in "law"), ə (the schwa), ŋ (the ng of "sing", which can start a word) and ʉ (in Bamum, a high back unrounded vowel), writes the glottal stop with an apostrophe ʼ, and marks tone on vowels: ´ high, ` low, ¯ mid, ˆ falling and ˇ rising, as in Ewondo ǎ ě ǒ. Fulfulde, the common language of the north, uses hooked letters ɓ and ɗ for implosive stops and ƴ for a preglottalized y, and Basaa uses ɓ too. There are no ready-made letters for ɛ or ɔ with a tone, so add a combining mark from the grid after the letter: ɛ followed by ́ gives ɛ́.

To type them, free Keyman keyboards for Cameroon languages come in AZERTY and QWERTY versions; in Word you can type the code and press Alt+X (025B for ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0259 for ə, 014B for ŋ, 0289 for ʉ), and in HTML they are ɛ, ɔ, ə and ŋ. For whole alphabets see the Ewondo, Basaa, Bulu, Fula, Yemba, Ngiemboon, Ghomala, Kom, Bamun and Medumba collections, and the English one for the other official language.

Indomitable Lions and sport emoji

There is no team emoji, so fans write 🦁⚽🇨🇲, and 🦁🦁🦁 is a goal. The Indomitable Lions have won the Africa Cup of Nations five times (1984, 1988, 2000, 2002 and 2017), and 🥇 recalls the Olympic football gold at Sydney 2000. At the 1990 World Cup Cameroon became the first African team to reach a quarter-final, and Roger Milla, aged 38, celebrated his goals with a dance at the corner flag, the 💃🕺 every Cameroonian over a certain age still pictures.

🏀 belongs to the Cameroonian players in the NBA, among them Joel Embiid and Pascal Siakam; 🥊 to Francis Ngannou, the former UFC heavyweight champion who grew up in Batié in the West region; and 🏃🌋 to the Race of Hope, the race up and down Mount Cameroon held every year from Buea.

Cameroonian food emoji: ndolé, poulet DG, soya and more

Ndolé, the dish many Cameroonians call national, is a stew of bitterleaf and ground peanuts, often with shrimp and beef, eaten with plantain or cassava sticks (miondo, bobolo): 🍲🥬🥜🦐 with 🍌 on the side. The shrimp is fitting, because the country is named after them: Portuguese sailors called the Wouri estuary Rio dos Camarões, the river of prawns.

🍗🍌 is poulet DG, chicken cooked with fried ripe plantain and vegetables, a festive dish whose DG stands for directeur général. 🐟🔥 is poisson braisé, whole fish grilled at night by the roadside with 🌶️ pepper sauce, and 🍢 is soya, spiced beef skewers grilled over coals. 🫘 stands for koki, the black-eyed-pea pudding steamed in banana leaves, and for the beans in beignets-haricots; 🍠 for cocoyam, pounded into achu in the Northwest; 🌽 for corn chaff. Cameroon is also a major grower of cocoa 🍫 and grows coffee ☕ too, and 🍺 is the cold bottle at the bar after work.

Makossa, holidays and everyday life in Cameroon emoji

🎷 is Manu Dibango, the Douala saxophonist whose 1972 "Soul Makossa" took Cameroon's makossa around the world (its chant was later borrowed by Michael Jackson). 🎶💃🕺 is makossa and bikutsi, the fast dance music of the Beti around Yaoundé, and 🥁🪘 the drums under both. 👑 stands for the traditional rulers who still matter: the fons of the Grassfields, the Sultan of the Bamoun in Foumban and the lamidos of the north.

20 May is National Day, which marks the 1972 vote for a unitary state, with parades in Yaoundé and new outfits in the year's commemorative fabric: 🇨🇲🎉🎆. 11 February is Youth Day. Christians send 🎄⛪ at Christmas; Muslims, many of them in the north, send 🌙🕌 for Ramadan and 🐏 for Tabaski, the feast of the sheep. In Douala, the port city 🚢🏙️, people get around on 🏍️ motorbike taxis called bendskin and in yellow 🚕 taxis; 🚆 is the night train from Yaoundé to Ngaoundéré, and 🛶 the pirogues raced on the Wouri at the Ngondo festival of the Sawa peoples.

Nature fills the rest: 🌋 Mount Cameroon, an active volcano rising from the sea near Buea and Limbe; 🌳🦍🐒🐘 the southern rainforest with its gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants; 🦒🦛 the northern savanna parks such as Waza and Bénoué; and 🏖️🐢🏞️ the beaches around Kribi, where sea turtles nest and the Lobé Falls drop straight into the sea. Neighbouring Nigeria has its own collection.