Comoros Emoji

The Comoros flag emoji 🇰🇲 shows the flag adopted with the new constitution of the Union of the Comoros at the turn of 2001 and 2002. Four horizontal stripes stand for four islands: yellow for Mohéli (Mwali), white for Mayotte (Maore), red for Anjouan (Ndzwani) and blue for Grande Comore (Ngazidja). A green triangle at the hoist, the colour of Islam, carries a white crescent and four white stars, again one star per island. To write it in the flag's colours, people paste 💛🤍❤️💙💚 after the flag, and ☪️ or 🌙⭐ stands for the crescent and stars.

The white stripe matters politically. When the islands voted on independence in the 1970s, Mayotte chose to stay with France, and it is today a French department with its own flag emoji 🇾🇹; the Comoros has always considered it the fourth island of the nation, and the flag says so. Earlier Comorian flags were mostly green with a white crescent, and the flag used from 1996 to 2001 added Arabic calligraphy; there are no emoji for those older designs.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇰🇲 is not a picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇰 + 🇲, spelling the country code KM, which matches the Comorian name Komori (CO was already taken by Colombia). Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag. Windows does not include country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the Comoros flag emoji appears as the letters 'KM'; the people you send it to on iPhone or Android still see the real flag.

Comoros emoji for the islands: Karthala, Mohéli and the sea

The Comoros are volcanic islands 🏝️ in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar, at the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel 🌍. The name is usually traced to the Arabic Juzur al-Qamar, 'the islands of the moon' 🌙, though the exact origin is not certain. Grande Comore, home of the capital Moroni, is dominated by Mount Karthala 🌋, an active volcano and the country's highest point at about 2,360 m, with one of the largest craters of any active volcano; its eruptions in 2005 spread ash over much of the island.

Anjouan and Mohéli are older and greener, with steep valleys ⛰️, waterfalls and patches of forest 🌳. At night the forests belong to Livingstone's fruit bat 🦇, one of the world's largest bats, which lives only on these two islands. Mohéli's quiet beaches 🏖️ are nesting grounds of green turtles 🐢, and humpback whales 🐋🐳 come to the warm water to calve in the southern winter, when dolphins 🐬, coral reefs 🪸 and reef fish 🐠 draw divers 🤿.

🐟 has a special meaning here. In 1938 a fish thought extinct for tens of millions of years, the coelacanth, was caught off South Africa; the second specimen, in 1952, came from the Comoros, and the deep volcanic slopes off Grande Comore turned out to be its main home. Comorians are proud of it, and the national football team is named after it.

Ylang-ylang, vanilla and cloves: the perfume islands

The Comoros are often called the perfume islands. 🌼 stands for ylang-ylang, a tree whose yellow, star-shaped flowers are picked by hand at dawn and distilled into an essential oil used by perfume houses around the world; the Comoros, Anjouan above all, is one of the largest producers of it. 🌿 covers the other two great crops, vanilla and cloves, which with ylang-ylang make up most of what the islands export.

That is why a Comorian post about home so often reads 🇰🇲🌼, and why the scent of ylang-ylang is the one thing visitors take away.

Pilao, mataba and Comorian food emoji

Rice 🍚 is at the centre of almost every Comorian meal, and 🍛 stands for pilao, rice cooked with spices and meat for weddings and holidays. 🍲🥥 is mataba, pounded cassava leaves simmered in coconut milk, and 🌶️ the hot pili-pili sauce on the side. The sea gives fish 🐟, octopus 🐙 and crab 🦀, and 🦞 is langouste à la vanille, lobster in vanilla sauce, the dish that puts two Comorian treasures on one plate.

Bananas 🍌, coconuts 🥥 and mangoes 🥭 grow everywhere, goats 🐐 are kept in most villages, and spiced tea 🫖🍵 goes with conversation in the evening, above all during Ramadan when families break the fast together after sunset.

Grand mariage, twarab and Comorian celebrations emoji

Sunni Islam is the faith of almost everyone in the Comoros, so ☪️🕌🌙🤲 are everyday emoji: for Ramadan, for Eid al-Fitr at its end, for Eid al-Adha, for Friday prayers and for the old Friday Mosque on the harbour of Moroni, whose history goes back to the 15th century. 📿 and 🕋 follow pilgrims to Mecca, and 🧕 the headscarves women wear with their colourful wraps.

💍👰🤵💰 is the grand mariage, the anda of Grande Comore: a wedding families save for over many years, with gold jewellery for the bride, days of feasting, zebu cattle 🐂 for the whole town and gifts of money 🪙. A man who has made his grand mariage gains a respected place in the village's councils, so it is far more than a party. Weddings are also where you hear twarab 🎶🎤, the Comorian form of the taarab music of the Swahili coast, and where women dance to drums 🥁🪘 💃🕺.

Independence Day on 6 July marks the declaration of independence from France in 1975 and is celebrated with 🇰🇲🎉🎆.

Les Cœlacanthes, the franc and how to type French letters

The national football team are Les Cœlacanthes, so fans send 🇰🇲⚽🐟. At their first Africa Cup of Nations, played in Cameroon in early 2022, they beat Ghana in the group stage and reached the last sixteen; with all their goalkeepers injured or ill, they faced the hosts Cameroon with a left-back, Chaker Alhadhur, in goal 🧤, and lost only 2–1.

The Comorian franc (KMF) has no Unicode sign; prices are written with CF or FC, as in 5 000 CF. It is pegged to the euro € 💶 at a fixed rate of about 492 francs per euro, so travellers think in euros, the money of neighbouring Mayotte. The country is small, about 900,000 people by the CLDR estimate, and a large share of Comorians live abroad 🇫🇷 🇷🇪 ✈️, so many that Marseille is jokingly called the 'fifth island'.

Comorian (Shikomori), a Bantu language close to Swahili, is the everyday language, spoken as Shingazidja on Grande Comore, Shindzuani on Anjouan and Shimwali on Mohéli; it is written both in Arabic script and in Latin letters. Arabic and French are official beside it. CLDR estimates about 333,000 speakers of Ngazidja Comorian and 306,000 of Ndzwani Comorian, and about 594,000 and 234,000 people who use Arabic and French. French needs the letters à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û; on a phone, hold the plain letter (e, c, a) and slide to the accent. On Windows, the US-International layout types é as ' then e, and Alt codes work too (Alt+0233 for é, Alt+0231 for ç); on a Mac, hold the key or use Option+E then e for é and Option+C for ç. The Arabic comma ، and question mark ؟ face the other way because Arabic runs right to left. See the Arabic, Ngazidja Comorian, Ndzwani Comorian and French collections for the full alphabets.