Dominica Emoji & Symbols

The Dominica flag emoji 🇩🇲 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, D and M (the country's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags, this one among them, arrived as emoji in 2015. Where flags are not supported (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters DM instead, but the text is the same and it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. Search "Dominica" in your phone's emoji panel to find it, and check you picked 🇩🇲 and not 🇩🇴, the Dominican Republic, which lies about 1,000 km away across the Caribbean.

The flag was designed by Alwin Bully and first raised at independence on 3 November 1978. On a green field a cross of three stripes, yellow, black and white, runs edge to edge, and in the centre a red disc holds a Sisserou parrot ringed by ten green stars, one for each of the island's ten parishes. Green is the rainforest, yellow the sunshine, the farms and the Kalinago people, black the rich soil and the African heritage of most Dominicans, white the rivers and waterfalls, and red social justice. The parrot's purple makes it one of the few national flags to include purple, alongside Nicaragua's; that is why people search "dominica flag purple" and why 💜 belongs in the colour string 💚💛🖤🤍❤️💜.

Dominica, not the Dominican Republic: 🇩🇲 vs 🇩🇴

Dominica (said dom-in-EE-ka) is a small English-speaking island republic between the French islands of Guadeloupe 🇬🇵 and Martinique 🇲🇶, with about 75,000 people by CLDR's estimate and its capital at Roseau. The Dominican Republic 🇩🇴 is a much larger Spanish-speaking country sharing the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, some 900 km to the north-west. People from both are called Dominicans, which is why searches for "dominican flag emoji" and "dominican symbols" mix the two.

In emoji the difference is one tap: 🇩🇲 is green with the yellow, black and white cross and the parrot, 🇩🇴 is a white cross on blue and red. The money differs too: Dominica writes EC$ for the Eastern Caribbean dollar, the Dominican Republic RD$ for its peso. For the Spanish-speaking country, see our Dominican Republic collection.

Dominica national symbols as emoji

The national bird is the Sisserou parrot (the imperial amazon), the largest of the amazon parrots, found nowhere but in Dominica's mountain forests, and the bird on the flag and the coat of arms; 🦜 is its emoji. Its smaller cousin the Jaco, the red-necked parrot, is also found only on Dominica. The Sisserou is critically endangered and the Jaco vulnerable, and parrot-watching in the Morne Diablotins forest is a classic Dominica outing.

The national flower is the Bwa Kwaib (Carib wood), a shrub that covers itself in scarlet blossoms in the dry season; there is no emoji for it, so people use 🌺. The national dish is callaloo soup 🥬🍲, made from dasheen leaves; mountain chicken 🐸, a huge frog, was popularly regarded as the national dish but was never officially designated; it is now critically endangered. The national dress is the wob dwiyet 👗, a long, full madras-trimmed gown with a headtie, worn on Creole Day. The motto on the coat of arms is in Kwéyòl: Après Bondie, C'est La Ter, "After God, the Earth".

The Nature Island: rainforest, volcanoes, Boiling Lake and whales

Dominica calls itself the Nature Island of the Caribbean, and the emoji people send are green and wet: 🌳🌿🍃🏞️ for rainforest that still covers most of the island, 🌧️🌈 for the daily showers and the rainbows after them, 💧 for its waterfalls (Trafalgar Falls, the Emerald Pool, the narrow Titou Gorge) and the 365 rivers it is said to have, one for every day of the year. Its highest peak is Morne Diablotins at about 1,447 m ⛰️.

The island is volcanic 🌋, and the Morne Trois Pitons National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A hike of several hours through it, past the steaming Valley of Desolation, ends at the Boiling Lake, a flooded fumarole usually called the second-largest hot lake in the world; ♨️ is for it and for the hot sulphur springs people soak in at Wotten Waven. The Waitukubuli National Trail 🥾🎒, named after the Kalinago name for the island, runs its whole length in 14 segments.

Offshore, sperm whales 🐋🐳 live off the west coast all year, which makes Dominica a well-known place to see them, with dolphins 🐬 often alongside; in 2023 the government announced plans for a sperm whale reserve there; Parliament formally established it in 2025. Divers 🤿 go to Champagne Reef, where volcanic gas rises from the sea floor in streams of bubbles 🫧, and to the reefs 🐠🪸 of the Soufrière–Scotts Head marine reserve. Visitors arrive by cruise ship 🛳️ in Roseau or by the ferry ⛴️ that links Dominica with Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Kalinago, Creole Day, carnival and Independence: the emoji people send

Dominica is home to the Kalinago, the island's indigenous people, most of whom live in the Kalinago Territory on the east coast, set aside in 1903. They are known for canoes 🛶 carved from a single gommier trunk and for larouma basket weaving 🧺, both shown at the Kalinago Barana Autê heritage village.

The national season runs through October and November. On Jounen Kwéyòl, Creole Day, usually the last Friday in October, people wear the wob dwiyet and madras 👗, speak Kwéyòl at work and school and eat Creole food. The World Creole Music Festival 🎶🎤 takes place over three nights of cadence-lypso, bouyon (a Dominican style born in the late 1980s), zouk and kompa, and Independence Day on 3 November 🇩🇲🎉🎆 is followed on 4 November by a National Day of Community Service. Jing ping bands play the older folk dances with an accordion 🪗, a shak-shak rattle 🪇, a tambal drum 🥁 and a boom-boom bass pipe.

Carnival, Mas Domnik, keeps the old pre-Lenten date, the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, starting with J'ouvert in the dark of Monday morning; 🎭🥁💃🕺 is its emoji set, and the traditional Sensay costume, a heap of shredded fabric, rope or banana leaves with a horned mask, is its oldest figure. Emancipation is marked on the first Monday of August ⛓️‍💥✊, Christmas 🎄 fills the Catholic churches ⛪ of a largely Catholic island, and 🌀 is never far from September posts since Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, struck on 18 September 2017.

Cricket 🏏 is played for the West Indies, which has no flag emoji of its own, and Roseau's Windsor Park hosts international matches; football ⚽ is the most played sport. At the Paris Olympics in 2024 the triple jumper Thea LaFond won Dominica's first ever Olympic medal, a gold 🥇.

Dominica currency symbol and how to type the Kwéyòl letters é è ò

Dominica pays in the Eastern Caribbean dollar (code XCD), shared with Antigua and Barbuda 🇦🇬, Anguilla 🇦🇮, Grenada 🇬🇩, Montserrat 🇲🇸, St. Kitts and Nevis 🇰🇳, St. Lucia 🇱🇨 and St. Vincent and the Grenadines 🇻🇨. It has no sign of its own: prices are written $, or EC$ when US dollars might be meant, as in EC$25. The EC dollar has been pegged at 2.70 to the US dollar since 1976, and US dollars 💵 are taken widely. $ is Shift + 4 on a US keyboard; the cent sign ¢ is Alt + 0162 on Windows, Option + 4 on a Mac and ¢ in HTML.

English is the official language and needs no accents, but many Dominicans, especially older ones, also speak Kwéyòl, a French-based Creole close to those of St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and its spelling uses three accented letters: é (Kwéyòl), è (mèsi, "thank you"; fèt) and ò (Kwéyòl, lòt). On Windows they are Alt + 0233 é, Alt + 0232 è and Alt + 0242 ò (capitals É Alt + 0201, È Alt + 0200, Ò Alt + 0210); on a Mac press Option + E then e for é, and Option + ` then e or o for è and ò; on a phone, long-press e or o. In HTML they are é, è and ò. In the north-east, around Marigot and Wesley, some people speak Kokoy, an English-based Creole. For the related languages see our English, French and Haitian Creole collections.