Fiji Emoji & Symbols

The Fiji flag emoji 🇫🇯 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, F and J (Fiji's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters FJ instead, but the same sequence appears as a flag only on platforms that support it.

The flag was raised on 10 October 1970, the day Fiji became independent. Its field is a light "Fiji blue" for the Pacific Ocean, which is why people write it as 🩵🤍 when they want it in hearts. In the corner is the Union Jack 🇬🇧, a reminder of nearly a century as a British colony, and on the fly is the shield from Fiji's coat of arms: a gold British lion 🦁 holding a cocoa pod across the top, then a red St George's cross dividing sugarcane (shown here with the rice-sheaf emoji 🌾), a coconut palm 🌴, a dove of peace 🕊️ and a bunch of bananas 🍌. In 2016 the government dropped a plan to replace the flag, and said the country wanted to keep it after the rugby team won Olympic gold under it.

Fiji rugby emoji: 🏉🇫🇯 and the sevens gold 🥇

No emoji says Fiji like 🏉. Rugby is played on every village green and school field, and sevens, the fast seven-a-side game, is where Fiji leads the world. At Rio 2016 the men's team beat Great Britain 43–7 in the final for Fiji's first Olympic medal of any kind, and they won gold again in Tokyo, beating New Zealand. In Paris 2024 they took silver after losing the final to France, and the women's team, the Fijiana, won bronze in Tokyo. On match days feeds fill with 🇫🇯🏉🔥, 🇫🇯🥇🙌 and 💪🩵; the fifteen-a-side team, the Flying Fijians, gets the same treatment.

Football ⚽ has a strong following too, especially among Indo-Fijians, and ⛳🏌️ belong to Vijay Singh, the Fiji-born golfer who became world number one in 2004.

Fiji island emoji: reefs, sharks, surf and the Fiji flower 🌺

Fiji is more than 300 islands, about a third of them lived on, with most people on the two big ones, Viti Levu (Suva, Nadi, Lautoka) and Vanua Levu. 🏝️🏖️🌅 cover the postcard side: the Mamanuca and Yasawa island groups west of Nadi are where most visitors go. 🌀 is serious here: cyclone season runs from November to April, and Cyclone Winston in 2016 was the strongest on record to hit the country. 💧 is the "Fiji water emoji" people search for, after the bottled water drawn from an artesian aquifer on Viti Levu.

Under water, 🪸🐠 are Rainbow Reef in the Somosomo Strait between Taveuni and Vanua Levu, nicknamed the soft coral capital of the world, and the Great Astrolabe Reef around Kadavu. 🦈 is Beqa Lagoon, where divers watch bull sharks, and also Dakuwaqa, the shark god of Fijian legend; 🏄 is Cloudbreak, a famous reef wave off Tavarua. For the "Fiji flower emoji", 🌺 is the one people use: it stands for the hibiscus tucked behind an ear and for the tagimoucia, the red-and-white flower that grows almost only on Taveuni. On land, 🦜 is the kula, the red collared lory whose feathers were once treasured for trimming fine mats, 🦎 the Fiji crested iguana and 🦇 the flying foxes.

Bula! Kava, village life and Fijian food emoji

Bula (literally "life") is a greeting, also used for cheers, and a whole attitude, so 👋🇫🇯 and Bula! open half the messages sent from Fiji. Visitors to a village bring a gift of kava roots, the sevusevu, to the chief. Yaqona, or kava, is a drink made from the pounded root of a pepper plant 🌿, mixed with water in a wide wooden bowl, the tanoa, and drunk from a bilo, a half coconut shell 🥥; you clap once 👏, say Bula, drink the bilo in one gulp, return it, clap three times and say Vinaka. A gathering around the bowl, for a ceremony or just an evening "grog" session, is the heart of Fijian social life. 🛖 is the bure, the thatched house; 🥁 the lali, the wooden slit drum that calls villages to church; 💃🕺🎶 the meke, dance told through song; 🎸 the string bands. 🔥🪨🚶 is firewalking (vilavilairevo), the tradition of the Sawau people of Beqa island, who walk barefoot across white-hot stones; Indo-Fijians also firewalk at South Indian Hindu temple festivals.

A feast means lovo, food wrapped in leaves 🍃 and cooked in an earth oven of hot stones: pork 🐖, fish, chicken and root crops. Unicode has no taro or cassava, so 🍠 stands in for dalo and tavioka. 🐟🍋‍🟩🥥 is kokoda, raw fish "cooked" in lime juice and finished with coconut cream. The Indo-Fijian kitchen gave the whole country its curries 🍛, roti 🫓, rice 🍚 and chillies 🌶️, and 🍍🥭 are the fruit sold at every municipal market. 🫖 is the sweet milky tea of every Fijian home, and 🍺 a cold Fiji Bitter.

Fiji Day, Diwali, Girmit and the emoji people send

Fiji Day, 10 October, celebrates two events on the same date: the cession of Fiji to Britain in 1874 and independence in 1970. It brings parades, church services and family feasts, and feeds fill with 🇫🇯🎉 and Happy Fiji Day! 🇫🇯🩵. In August, Suva holds the Hibiscus Festival 🌺, and at New Year Fiji, at UTC+12, is one of the first countries to see the fireworks 🎆.

Fiji is a country of several faiths. Most iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians are Christian, the largest church being the Methodist, so ✝️⛪🙏📖 are everyday emoji and Sunday is quiet. Most Indo-Fijians are Hindu 🕉️🛕, with a Muslim minority ☪️🕌, and Diwali 🪔✨ and the Prophet's Birthday are national public holidays alongside Christmas 🎄 and Easter. Indo-Fijians descend largely from about 60,000 indentured labourers, the girmitiya, brought from India 🇮🇳 between 1879 and 1916; the first ship 🚢, the Leonidas, reached Levuka on 14 May 1879, remembered as Girmit Day. 🥻 and 🪘 (a generic long-drum emoji used for Fiji Hindi music) belong to the same story.

Fijian letters, Fiji Hindi and the Fiji dollar $

Fiji has three main languages: English, used by nearly everyone (CLDR estimates about 890,000 speakers), Fijian or iTaukei (about 370,000) and Fiji Hindi (about 390,000), with standard Hindi taught in schools. Fijian's everyday Latin spelling omits diacritics; learner dictionaries use macrons to mark long vowels, and some letters stand for sounds English spells differently. In the spelling system developed by David Cargill in the 1830s, c is the "th" of "that", g the "ng" of "singer", q the "ngg" of "finger", b is said "mb" and d "nd". So Nadi is "Nandi", Beqa "Mbengga", Mamanuca "Mamanutha" and moce (goodbye) "mo-theh". See our Fijian collection for the language.

Fiji Hindi grew among the girmitiya from Awadhi, Bhojpuri and other languages of North India; it is mostly written in the Latin alphabet in daily life, while standard Hindi uses Devanagari, from which this page keeps ॐ, the sacred syllable Om (🕉️ is its emoji form). See our Fiji Hindi and Hindi collections for the scripts. The money is the Fiji dollar (FJD), written $ or FJ$ and split into 100 cents ¢, with 💵 and 🪙 as the emoji. To type ॐ on a computer, copy it from the grid or, in Word, type 0950 and press Alt + X; in HTML it is ॐ.