Faroe Islands Emoji & Symbols

The Faroe Islands flag emoji 🇫🇴 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, F and O, the islands' own ISO country code, which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Country and territory flags like this one became emoji in 2015. Where flags are not supported, notably Windows' own emoji font, the reader sees the letters FO instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on a phone.

The flag is called Merkið, "the banner": a white field with a red Nordic cross edged in blue. Faroese students in Copenhagen designed it in 1919. The usual reading of the Faroese flag colours is that the white stands for the sea foam and the bright northern sky, while the red and blue are colours of old Faroese dress and also appear in the flags of the other Nordic countries. People who cannot show the flag paste its colours as hearts, 🤍💙❤️.

Faroe Islands Flag Day, Flaggdagur, is 25 April. On that day in 1940, with Denmark occupied by Germany, the British forces who had occupied the islands allowed Faroese ships to fly Merkið instead of the Danish flag. It became the official flag under the Home Rule Act of 1948, which made the Faroes a self-governing nation within the Kingdom of Denmark. On Flaggdagur and on the national holiday Ólavsøka in July, 🇫🇴🎉 is the usual post.

Faroe Islands symbols: sheep, the ram and the oystercatcher

🐑 Ewe and 🐏 Ram are the strongest Faroe Islands symbols. The name Føroyar is usually explained as "sheep islands", the coat of arms is a silver ram on a blue shield, and there are more sheep than people on the islands, grazing the steep grass slopes right up to the cliff edges. Wool, mutton and the ram run through Faroese life, so 🐑🇫🇴 says "the Faroes" to anyone who knows them.

🐦 Bird stands for the national bird, the oystercatcher (tjaldur), and for the seabirds that make the cliffs famous. The oystercatcher's spring return is celebrated on 12 March, and puffins nest by the thousand on islands like Mykines. There is no puffin emoji, so 🐦 or 🐦🌊 stands in for them. 🤍💙❤️ are the flag in hearts, and 🚣 and ⚽ belong here too, for the national sport and the national team.

Islands, cliffs and weather: 🌊 ⛴️ 🌫️ 🌧️ 🌈 🧌

The Faroes are eighteen main islands between Iceland, Norway and Scotland, home to about 55,000 people according to Statistics Faroe Islands, and the sea is in every view. 🌊, 🚢 and ⚓ are the fishing fleet and the harbours; fish and fish products make up most of the islands' exports, and farmed salmon is a big part of that, so 🐟 and 🎣 are everyday emoji. ⛴️ is the inter-island ferries and the Norröna, the Smyril Line ship from Denmark to Tórshavn; 🚁 is the subsidised helicopter routes that link the smallest islands; ✈️ lands at Vágar, the only airport; and 🚗 drives the undersea tunnels, one of which, the Eysturoyartunnilin, has a roundabout under the sea.

⛰️ and 🏞️ are the green, treeless mountains and waterfalls such as Múlafossur at Gásadalur, which drops straight from a cliff toward the sea. ⛯ is the map sign for a lighthouse, and the Kallur lighthouse on Kalsoy, on a grass ridge above sheer cliffs, is a popular spot for photographers. 🧌🪨🌅 tells the legend of Risin and Kellingin, two sea stacks off northern Eysturoy: a giant and a witch who tried to drag the islands to Iceland and were turned to stone when the sun rose.

Then the weather: 🌫️ fog that rolls in within minutes, 🌧️ and 🌦️ rain and sun in the same hour, 🌬️ wind, and 🌈 rainbows to go with them. 🌧️🌬️🌦️🌈 is the classic "four seasons in a day" post. 🌌 stands in for the northern lights on clear winter nights (there is no aurora emoji), and 🥾 📸 are the hikers and photographers who come for the cliffs.

Food, culture and the Faroese year in emoji

🍖 Meat on Bone is skerpikjøt, wind-dried mutton cured for months in a slatted shed, the hjallur, where the salty sea air does the work; fish is dried the same way. 🍖🐑 is the closest pair. 🥔 goes with almost every meal, 🍺 is Föroya Bjór, brewed in Klaksvík since 1888, and ☕ is the coffee and cake of every visit. 🐋 means the whales offshore, pilot whales above all; the traditional pilot whale drive, the grindadráp, is an old and much-debated part of island life, so the emoji reads differently depending on who sends it. 🦭 is the Seal Woman, Kópakonan, a legend told in Mikladalur on Kalsoy, where her statue stands on the shore; 🐴 is the small, rare Faroese horse and 🦆 the eider ducks of the bays.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 and 🎶 are the Faroese chain dance: people link arms in a long ring and dance to long medieval ballads, kvæði, sung without instruments. 🎸 is the newer music scene and the G! Festival on the beach at Gøta every July. 🧶 is Faroese knitwear, famous since the patterned jumper worn by Sarah Lund in the Danish series The Killing turned out to be made by a Faroese knitwear company. 🏡 stands for the turf-roofed houses, ⛪ for the old churches such as those at Kirkjubøur, with its medieval cathedral ruin, and ✉️ for Faroese stamps, first issued in 1975 by the Danish postal service before the Faroese postal service took over in 1976.

The biggest holiday is Ólavsøka, 28 and 29 July, the national day in Tórshavn: the opening of the Løgting, the Faroese parliament, rowing races in the harbour, a parade, and chain dancing late into the light summer night. 🇫🇴🎉🚣🧑‍🤝‍🧑 is an Ólavsøka post. Gleðilig jól! 🎄 is Christmas, and 🎉 marks Flaggdagur on 25 April.

Rowing 🚣, football ⚽ and handball 🤾

🚣 Rowing is the national sport. Crews race slim wooden boats built in the old Faroese way, descended from Norse boats, through a summer season of regattas that ends at Ólavsøka. ⚽ is the national football team, member of FIFA since 1988: in their very first competitive match, on 12 September 1990, the Faroes beat Austria 1–0, with goalkeeper Jens Martin Knudsen famous for playing in a woolly bobble hat. Áfram Føroyar! ⚽🇫🇴 ("Go Faroes!") is the fans' cry. 🤾 is handball, the fastest-growing sport on the islands; the men's team reached its first European Championship in 2024.

Faroese letters ð ø æ á, the króna and how to type them

Faroese is the islands' language, a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse and closest to Icelandic; Danish is also used officially and taught in school. The Faroese alphabet has 29 letters: A Á B D Ð E F G H I Í J K L M N O Ó P R S T U Ú V Y Ý Æ Ø. It has no C, Q, W, X or Z except in foreign words. Compared with the Icelandic alphabet, Faroese has Ø where Icelandic has Ö, and it has neither Þ nor É.

The accented vowels Á Í Ó Ú Ý are separate letters with their own sounds, not stress marks: Tórshavn, Vágar, Klaksvík. Í and Ý sound the same, as do I and Y. Ð ð (eth) is the curious one: it is kept in the spelling for history's sake but is silent or only a glide, so góðan dag, "good day", has no "th" sound at all, unlike Icelandic. No word begins with ð, so capital Ð appears only in text set in capitals. Æ æ and Ø ø come at the end of the alphabet, as in Føroyar and Gøta. Danish adds Å å, which Faroese itself does not use. Our Icelandic Letters and Danish Letters collections, and Denmark, Iceland and Norway Emoji & Symbols, cover the neighbours.

The Faroe Islands currency is the Faroese króna (plural krónur), pegged one to one to the Danish krone. It has its own banknotes but uses Danish coins, Danish notes are accepted everywhere, and the international code is the Danish DKK. Prices are written kr or kr., Nordic style, often after the number with a decimal comma: 49,50 kr. 🪙 is the emoji for it.

How to type ð and the other letters: Windows has a Faroese keyboard layout, and its Alt codes are Alt + 0208 Ð, 0240 ð, 0198 Æ, 0230 æ, 0216 Ø, 0248 ø, 0193 Á, 0225 á, 0205 Í, 0237 í, 0211 Ó, 0243 ó, 0218 Ú, 0250 ú, 0221 Ý, 0253 ý. With the US-International layout, AltGr + D gives ð, AltGr + Z æ, AltGr + L ø, and an apostrophe followed by a vowel gives the acute. On a Mac, Option + ' gives æ, Option + O ø (add Shift for capitals), and Option + E then the vowel gives á í ó ú. On a phone, long-press A, O or the other vowels, or add the Faroese keyboard in Gboard. In HTML: ð, æ, ø, á, ý.