Ivory Coast Emoji

🇨🇮 the Ivory Coast flag emoji shows three vertical bands, orange, white and green, with the orange next to the flagpole. Its Unicode sequence is 🇨 and 🇮, the regional indicator symbols for the country code CI; platforms that support this flag sequence display the flag, while unsupported platforms may show the letters CI.

The flag was adopted in December 1959, a few months before independence on 7 August 1960. Its colours are usually explained as orange for the savanna of the north, white for peace and unity, and green for hope and the forests of the south. Where flags don't show, people write it with hearts, 🧡🤍💚, or squares, 🟧⬜🟩, in usernames, match chats and every 7 August post.

The elephant 🐘 is the national animal. An elephant's head sits at the centre of the coat of arms, between two palm trees 🌴 with a rising sun 🌅 above it, and the national football team are Les Éléphants, so 🐘 next to ⚽ or 🇨🇮 reads as the Elephants straight away. The national motto is Union, Discipline, Travail, and peace is a word Ivorians use a lot: 🕊️ and 🤝 turn up in posts about reconciliation and national unity, and Yamoussoukro's great basilica is dedicated to Our Lady of Peace.

Ivory Coast flag vs Ireland flag: 🇨🇮 or 🇮🇪?

The most common mistake with this emoji is sending Ireland's flag instead. 🇮🇪 Ireland is green, white, orange, with the green next to the pole; 🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire is orange, white, green, with the orange next to the pole. On a real flagpole they also differ in shape: the Irish flag is twice as long as it is high (1:2), the Ivorian one is 2:3, but emoji fonts usually draw both at the same size, so the order of the colours is the only clue. Remember: Ivory Coast starts with orange.

The two flags have nothing to do with each other. Ireland's tricolour dates from 1848; Côte d'Ivoire's was chosen in 1959 and, like the flags of several other former French colonies, is a vertical tricolour in the manner of the French flag. Two more flags with the same three colours get mixed in too: 🇳🇪 Niger has horizontal stripes with an orange disc in the middle, and 🇮🇳 India has horizontal saffron, white and green with a blue wheel. Football fans make the mix-up every tournament, which is why "🇨🇮 not 🇮🇪" is a joke of its own.

Côte d’Ivoire letters: ô, French accents and the FCFA

The country was named by European traders for the ivory bought on this coast. In 1985 the government asked that its name not be translated any more, so the United Nations and most official bodies write Côte d’Ivoire in every language, said roughly "koht dee-VWAHR", while English speakers still say Ivory Coast; the people are Ivorians, Ivoiriens in French. Writing the name properly takes an ô and an apostrophe, ideally the curly ’.

French is the official language; CLDR estimates about 10 million people in Côte d’Ivoire can use it in digital interfaces, in a population of about 30 million. It is the language of school, government and the press, and it is widely used in texting. French-language keyboards, often the AZERTY layout, have keys for é è à ç and ù. On a US keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt+0244 ô, Alt+0212 Ô, Alt+0233 é, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0224 à, Alt+0231 ç, Alt+0234 ê, Alt+0146 ’, Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 ». On a Mac, Option+I then o gives ô, Option+E then e gives é, Option+` then e gives è, Option+C gives ç, Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ give « and ». On a phone, long-press the plain letter. French puts a space inside guillemets and before ? ! : and ;, as in « On dit quoi ? ». The full alphabet is in the French collection.

Côte d'Ivoire pays in the West African CFA franc (code XOF), issued by the BCEAO and shared with Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. It has no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written with the letters after the number, 5 000 FCFA or 5 000 F CFA, and in speech simply "francs". The franc is pegged to the euro at 655.957 francs to one euro. For money talk people use 💰, 🪙 and 💵, and 💸 for the cash thrown over dancers at a party.

Letters of Baoulé, Dioula, Senoufo and Dan

More than 70 languages are spoken in Côte d'Ivoire. The largest local-language populations in CLDR's data are about 3.3 million functional users of Baoulé in the centre around Bouaké and Yamoussoukro, about 1.3 million functional users of Cebaara Senoufo in the north around Korhogo, and about 1.2 million functional users of Dan (Yacouba) in the west around Man. Dioula (Jula) is the market language of the north and of trade all over the country, Abidjan included. Baoulé is an Akan language, a relative of Anyi and of Twi in Ghana, and its word akwaba, welcome, is heard all over the country; Dioula is a Manding language, very close to Bambara in Mali; Senoufo belongs to the Gur family and Dan to the Mande family.

Written in Latin letters, these languages have a few vowels and consonants of their own. Ɛ ɛ is open e, the vowel of English "bed", and Ɔ ɔ is open o, the vowel of British "law"; Baoulé, Dioula and many other Ivorian languages write them. Dioula, spelled like Bambara, adds Ɲ ɲ for the ny sound of Spanish ñ and Ŋ ŋ for the ng of "sing". Tone matters in all of them, though everyday writing usually leaves it unmarked.

Few keyboards have these letters, so copy them from this page. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0190 for Ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0186 for Ɔ, 0272 for ɲ, 019D for Ɲ, 014B for ŋ and 014A for Ŋ. Each language has its own collection: Baoulé, Dioula, Cebaara Senoufo and Dan, with Bambara for Dioula's close neighbour.

Ivorian food emoji: attiéké, alloco, garba and cocoa

There is no attiéké emoji, so Ivorians use 🍚: attiéké is grated, fermented and steamed cassava, light and slightly sour, and its classic plate is attiéké poisson braisé, with a whole grilled fish 🐟, raw tomato 🍅, onion 🧅 and chili 🌶️. Garba, attiéké with fried tuna and a lot of chili, is the cheap street lunch of Abidjan. 🍌 stands for plantain: alloco is ripe plantain fried in palm oil, and foutou is plantain or yam 🍠 pounded into a smooth ball, eaten with a sauce.

🥘 and 🍲 are the sauces and stews: sauce graine made from palm nuts, sauce arachide from groundnuts 🥜, and kedjenou, chicken 🍗 slow-cooked with vegetables in a sealed clay pot. 🍖🔥 is choukouya, grilled meat with onions and spice, the classic order at a maquis, the open-air restaurant-bar where Ivorians eat, drink and dance. To drink there is ginger juice, gnamakoudji 🫚, bissap from hibiscus 🌺, palm wine, fruit juices 🍹 and cold beer 🍺; 🍍 🥭 and 🥥 are the fruit of the coast.

🍫 is the country's great export. Côte d'Ivoire grows more cocoa than any other country, about two in every five cocoa beans in the world, almost all of it on small family farms 🧑‍🌾🌱. It is also a large producer of coffee ☕ and the world's biggest grower of raw cashew nuts; 🌰 is the nearest emoji for cashews and for the kola nuts that are offered as a sign of respect.

Les Éléphants, coupé-décalé, holidays and Abidjan emoji

Football comes first. 🐘⚽🇨🇮 cheers Les Éléphants, champions of Africa in 1992, 2015 and in the Africa Cup of Nations that Côte d'Ivoire hosted in early 2024, won 2–1 against Nigeria in the final at the new stadium 🏟️ at Ebimpé near Abidjan. Didier Drogba, the country's record scorer, is remembered as much for his televised appeal for peace in 2005, after the team qualified for its first World Cup, as for his goals, and Yaya Touré was African Footballer of the Year four years running. 🥋 is for Cheick Sallah Cissé, whose taekwondo gold at Rio 2016 was the country's first Olympic title, 🏃 for sprinters such as Marie-Josée Ta Lou, and 🏉 for the rugby team that played the 1995 World Cup.

🎶🎤💃🕺 is the sound of Abidjan. Coupé-décalé, launched by Ivorian DJs in Paris in the early 2000s, is party music built for dancing and for travaillement, showering the dancers with banknotes 💸; zouglou grew out of the student campuses of the 1990s and went worldwide with Magic System's "Premier Gaou"; and Alpha Blondy made Ivorian reggae famous. 🥁🪘 are the drums of village festivals, and 🎭 is the nearest emoji to the country's masks: the Dan masks of the west, the Guro's zaouli dance, listed by UNESCO, and the Senufo masks of the north.

Independence Day on 7 August is 🇨🇮🎉🎆. About as many Ivorians are Muslim as Christian, so the calendar has both: 🌙 for Ramadan, 🐏🕌 for Tabaski (Eid al-Adha), when families share a ram, and 🎄⛪ for Christmas, with 🙏 at the end of most messages of thanks. Many peoples also hold their own festivals, like the yam festival 🍠 of the Agni and Abron, the Abissa of Grand-Bassam and the Baoulé Easter homecoming, Paquinou; 👑 stands for the traditional kings and queens who still preside over them, and 💍 for weddings in matching wax-print outfits.

🏙️🌉 is Abidjan, the Plateau's towers across the Ébrié Lagoon and its long bridges, and 🏖️🌊 the Atlantic beaches of Assinie and Grand-Bassam, the old colonial capital 🏛️ now on the UNESCO list. Yamoussoukro, the political capital, has the basilica and the crocodiles 🐊 of the lake by the presidential palace. Abidjan gets around by orange metered taxi 🚕, shared woro-woro, gbaka minibus 🚐 and the bateau-bus ⛴️ across the lagoon, and the port 🚢 ships much of the world's cocoa. 🏞️⛰️🌳 are Taï National Park's rainforest, Comoé in the north and Mont Nimba, the highest peak, where pygmy hippos 🦛, chimpanzees 🐒 and leopards 🐆 still live.