Estonia Emoji

The Estonia flag emoji 🇪🇪 shows three equal horizontal stripes of blue, black and white (sinimustvalge, “blue-black-white”, which is also what Estonians call the flag). It began as the banner of the Estonian Students’ Society, consecrated in Otepää on 4 June 1884, which is why 4 June is Flag Day. The flag was banned during the Soviet occupation; on 24 February 1989 it was raised again on the Tall Hermann tower of Toompea Castle in Tallinn, where it still flies every day. The colours are commonly read as sky, soil and hope, and fans write them as hearts 💙🖤🤍 or squares 🟦⬛⬜.

Like every country flag, 🇪🇪 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇪 + 🇪 for the country code EE (from Eesti, the Estonian name of the country). Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters EE instead. The flag is still there: paste it into a message and an iPhone or Android user sees 🇪🇪. 🇪🇺 belongs beside it, since Estonia joined the European Union in 2004.

Estonia has a set of national nature symbols, and most of them have an emoji. The wolf 🐺 was chosen as the national animal in 2018, the barn swallow (🐦, there is no swallow emoji) is the national bird, the oak 🌳 the national tree, limestone 🪨 the national stone, seen in the cliffs of the north coast and the walls of Tallinn, and the Baltic herring 🐟 the national fish. The national flower, the blue cornflower, has no emoji; 💙 is the usual stand-in.

Estonian letters Õ Ä Ö Ü Š Ž and the euro sign

Estonian is a Finnic language, a close relative of Finnish and not related to its Baltic neighbours Latvian and Lithuanian or to Russian. Its alphabet runs A B (C) D E F G H I J K L M N O P (Q) R S Š Z Ž T U V (W) Õ Ä Ö Ü (X Y): the special vowels come at the very end, and Z and Ž sit after S. Õ õ is the most Estonian of them, a vowel said like an o with unrounded lips, introduced in the early 19th century by the pastor and linguist Otto Wilhelm Masing; it is in everyday words like jõulud (Christmas) and õnne (luck). Ä Ö Ü are the front vowels also found in Finnish and German (aitäh, thank you; öö, night; üks, one). Š š and Ž ž appear only in loanwords and foreign names, such as šokolaad and žürii. Estonian quotation marks open low and close high: „Tere!“.

To type them: the Estonian keyboard layout has its own keys for Õ, Ä, Ö and Ü to the right of P and L. On a US keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad 0245 õ, 0213 Õ, 0228 ä, 0246 ö, 0252 ü, 0154 š and 0158 ž. On a Mac, Option+N then O gives õ and Option+U then a vowel gives ä ö ü. On a phone, hold O, A, U, S or Z and pick the letter. In HTML they are õ, ä, ö, ü, š and ž.

Estonia has paid in euros € since 1 January 2011, replacing the kroon that was brought back in 1992; the kroon was written “kr” and never had a symbol of its own. 💶 and 🪙 cover the notes and coins. The country has about 1.2 million people by CLDR estimates. Estonian is the only official language, spoken by roughly 850,000; Russian is spoken by roughly 670,000 counting second-language speakers, and many people also speak English and Finnish. Their letters live on the Estonian, Russian, English and Finnish language pages.

Estonia emoji for food, forests and islands

🍞 black rye bread (leib) is on the table at every meal, and 🌾 stands for the rye it is baked from. Put sprats on it and you have kiluvõileib, the sprat sandwich 🐟🥪 of every party table. Summer and autumn send Estonians into the forest for mushrooms 🍄🍄‍🟫 and berries 🫐, while garden strawberries 🍓 mark high summer. 🥔 potatoes come with almost everything, and 🥛 stands for the kefir and buttermilk used with kama, a roasted grain flour eaten as a drink or a dessert. 🍺 is for beers like Saku and A. Le Coq, 🥃 for Vana Tallinn, the dark rum-based liqueur.

About half of Estonia is covered by forest 🌲, and the coast is broken into more than 2,000 islands 🏝️, the largest being Saaremaa and Hiiumaa. 🥾 is for the bog boardwalks that cross the wetlands. The forests hold moose 🫎, deer 🦌, wild boar 🐗, brown bears 🐻, foxes 🦊 and beavers 🦫 as well as wolves, and grey and ringed seals 🦭 live along the coast. In a hard winter ❄️ the sea freezes and ice roads 🧊 open across it to the islands.

Tallinn’s Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, is the 🏰⛪ of the page: Toompea Castle on its hill, medieval walls and towers, and the tall spire of St Olaf’s Church. 🛖 recalls the thatched farmhouses of the countryside, ⛴️ the ferries that cross the Gulf of Finland between Tallinn and Helsinki in about two hours, and ⛵ the sailing harbour of Pirita, which hosted the sailing races of the 1980 Olympics.

Estonian holidays, sauna and song

Independence Day on 24 February marks the declaration of 1918 and is celebrated with the flag 🇪🇪 at sunrise; 20 August marks the restoration of independence in 1991. Jaanipäev (St John’s Day, 24 June, with Victory Day on 23 June) is the summer high point: on the light Midsummer eve people light bonfires 🔥, jump over the flames, wear flower wreaths 🌼 and go looking for the fern flower said to bloom only that night. “Head jaanipäeva! 🔥🌼” is the greeting.

At Christmas (jõulud) 🎄 the table has blood sausage (🌭 is the nearest emoji) with sauerkraut 🥬 and roast pork, many families light candles 🕯️ on relatives’ graves on Christmas Eve, and jõuluvana, Father Christmas 🎅, asks children for a poem or song before handing over presents. On Shrove Tuesday (vastlapäev) children go sledging 🛷; by old belief the longer the slide, the taller the flax will grow.

The sauna 🧖♨️ is part of Estonian life, and the smoke sauna tradition of Võromaa in the south-east is on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list. 🌿 is the whisk of birch twigs (viht) and 🪵 the firewood. Song is just as central: the first national song festival was held in Tartu in 1869, and the huge song celebrations in Tallinn, with tens of thousands of singers, are on UNESCO’s list too 🎶🎤🎼. Between 1987 and 1991 the mass singing of banned national songs gave the road to independence its name, the Singing Revolution. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 stands for the Baltic Way of 23 August 1989, when about two million people held hands in a chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 🪗 is the lõõtspill, the button accordion of village dances, and 🧶🧤 the knitted patterned mittens and striped skirts of island crafts.

Digital Estonia and sports emoji

Estonia calls itself e-Estonia: residents use a chip ID card 🪪 to sign documents and use public services online, internet voting 🗳️ has been possible in elections since 2005, and eligible applicants from around the world can apply for e-Residency 💻. Skype 📞 was built by Estonian engineers, Bolt 🚕🛴 was founded in Tallinn, and the six-wheeled delivery robots 🤖 of Starship Technologies were developed there too, so 🧑‍💻📱 fit the country well.

Basketball 🏀 has a long and loyal following, and football ⚽ fills the stands for the national team in Tallinn. Cross-country skiing ⛷️🎿 brought Olympic gold to Andrus Veerpalu and Kristina Šmigun-Vähi, wrestler Kristjan Palusalu 🤼 won two golds at the 1936 Olympics, and Ott Tänak 🏎️🏁 became world rally champion in 2019. Anett Kontaveit 🎾 reached world number two in tennis, and the chess grandmaster Paul Keres ♟️ is a national hero.