Chad Emoji & Symbols

Chad's flag is three vertical bands of blue, gold and red. It was adopted on 6 November 1959, the year before independence. The colours are usually explained like this: blue for the sky, for hope and for the water of the south, gold for the sun and the desert of the north, and red for progress, unity and the sacrifice made for the country. The first design was meant to be green, gold and red, but those colours were already taken by the Mali Federation, so the green became blue.

The Chad flag emoji 🇹🇩 is not a single picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇹 and 🇩, spelling TD, the country's ISO code taken from the French name Tchad. Phones and apps that recognise the pair draw the flag, and current iPhones and Android phones do. Windows is the exception: its own emoji font has no country flags, so on a Windows PC 🇹🇩 often shows as the letters TD while the person you send it to sees the flag.

Romania's flag 🇷🇴 has the same three colours in the same order and the same 2:3 shape; only Chad's blue is a little darker. On a small screen the two emoji are almost impossible to tell apart, which is why people search "chad vs romania flag emoji". In 2004, unconfirmed media reports said Chad had asked the United Nations to look at the question; Romania's president said his country would not give up its tricolour. If the difference matters, write the name next to the flag: 🇹🇩 Tchad. For the colours alone, people use hearts: 💙💛❤️.

Chad national symbols in emoji

The coat of arms has a shield of wavy blue and gold lines standing for Lake Chad 🌊, held by a goat 🐐 for the north and a lion 🦁 for the south, with a rising sun 🌅 above it. The motto is Unité – Travail – Progrès (unity, work, progress) and the national anthem is La Tchadienne. Lists of Chad's national animals usually name the goat and the lion for that reason.

Chad is the fifth-largest country in Africa 🌍, with an estimated population of about 21 million. Its capital, N'Djamena, was called Fort-Lamy until 1973; it sits where the Logone River meets the Chari, with Cameroon just across the water.

The currency is the Central African CFA franc, code XAF. It has no Unicode sign: it is written FCFA or F CFA after the amount (5 000 FCFA), and Chad shares it with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

Lake Chad, the Sahara and Zakouma: 🛶 🐪 🐘

Lake Chad gave the country its name. It is shared with Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, and it is famous for how much it has shrunk: by common estimates it has lost around nine tenths of its open water since the 1960s. People still fish it and the Chari from dugout pirogues 🛶🎣🐟, hippos 🦛 and crocodiles 🐊 live along the rivers, and the lake islands are home to the Kouri cattle 🐂, known for their huge, swollen horns.

The north is Sahara 🏜️. The Tibesti mountains are volcanic 🌋, and their Emi Koussi is the highest peak of the Sahara. The Ennedi plateau is a maze of sandstone pillars and natural arches 🪨, with rock paintings of cattle, horses and camels; it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016, and the Lakes of Ounianga, a chain of desert lakes, since 2012. At the Guelta d'Archei in Ennedi, herders water their camels 🐪 in a pool where a few desert crocodiles still survive. The oases of Borkou grow dates under palms 🌴, and the nomads of the north travel with tents, camels and horses ⛺🐎.

Zakouma National Park in the south-east is the country's great wildlife park: elephants 🐘, giraffes 🦒, buffalo 🐃 and lions 🦁. Its elephants were cut down by poaching in the 2000s and have been growing again since the park came under the management of African Parks in 2010. And 🦴 is for Toumaï, the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, found in the Djurab Desert in 2001 and dated to about seven million years ago, one of the oldest known members of the human family tree.

Chadian food emoji: boule, sauces and sweet tea

The everyday staple is boule, a stiff paste of millet or sorghum flour 🌾🥣 (maize or cassava in the south), shaped by hand and dipped in a sauce 🍲🥘: okra, dried fish, meat, or peanut 🥜, with hot pepper 🌶️ on the side. Grilled and stewed meat 🍖 is the food of celebrations, and dried and smoked fish from the lake and the rivers travels all over the country.

Karkanji, a deep-red drink made from hibiscus flowers 🌺, is served cold everywhere, especially when the Ramadan fast is broken. Strong, very sweet tea poured into small glasses 🍵🫖 is the drink of hospitality, and in the north fresh camel and cow milk 🥛 is part of daily life. In the south mangoes 🥭 ripen in the hot season.

Arabic and French: writing Chad's languages

Chad has two official languages, French and Arabic, and well over a hundred local languages. Chadian Arabic is the common language of markets and streets, especially in N'Djamena and the north, and the Sara languages are spoken widely in the south. Standard Arabic is written right to left in the 28-letter Arabic alphabet shown in the grid, with ء أ إ آ ؤ ئ for the hamza and ة ى at word ends; its comma is ، and its question mark ؟. The country's name in Arabic is تشاد. More on the script is in the Arabic collection.

French adds é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô û ù ü ÿ and the ligatures œ and æ, as in République du Tchad and Tchadien, and uses « guillemets » for quotation marks. On a phone, hold a letter down to pick its accent; on Windows, the US-International keyboard gives é from ' then e; on a Mac, Option-E then e gives é. See the French collection for every method.

Holidays, faith and sport in Chad emoji

Chad is a little over half Muslim and around four in ten Christian, and both faiths' holidays are public holidays. Ramadan and Eid are sent as 🌙🕌☪️, and Eid al-Adha, called Tabaski in much of the region, brings family feasts. Christmas 🎄⛪✝️ and Easter are kept across the south. Independence Day, 11 August, marks independence from France in 1960 and gets 🇹🇩🎉; 1 December is Freedom and Democracy Day.

Football ⚽ is the most popular sport, and the national team is called Les Sao, after the Sao civilisation that lived south of Lake Chad centuries ago. Basketball 🏀 is played on courts across N'Djamena. For music, 🥁🎶💃 covers the drums and dances of weddings and festivals. For dress, 🧕 fits the long wrapped veils many Chadian women wear and 👳 the turbans of men in the north.