Finland Emoji & Symbols

The Finland flag emoji 🇫🇮 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, F and I, Finland's ISO country code, which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags, Finland's among them, became emoji around 2015. Windows' own emoji font has no flags, so there it shows as the letters FI, but the text underneath is the same and turns back into a flag on the reader's phone. To copy and paste the Finnish flag emoji, tap 🇫🇮 in the grid above, or search "Finland" on your emoji keyboard ("Suomi" works with a Finnish keyboard).

The flag itself, siniristilippu, the blue-cross flag, is a blue Nordic cross on white, made official in 1918, the year after independence. Its colours are popularly read as the blue of Finland's lakes and sky and the white of its snow. People who want the flag's feel without the flag paste its colours as hearts, 💙🤍. The state flag adds the coat of arms where the arms of the cross meet: a crowned golden lion on red, brandishing a straight sword and trampling a curved sabre. That lion is why 🦁 is a Finnish symbol, and why the men's national ice hockey team are Leijonat, the Lions.

Finland's national animal is the brown bear 🐻, karhu, once so respected that people avoided its real name and used dozens of nicknames instead, karhu itself probably among them. The national bird is the whooper swan 🦢, laulujoutsen, and two of them fly across the Finnish 1 euro coin. And sisu, the Finnish word for quiet, stubborn grit when things are hard, has no emoji of its own: 💪 is how most people write it.

Sauna emoji 🧖 and the Finnish summer cottage 🏡

If one emoji means Finland, it is 🧖 Person in Steamy Room. Sauna is a Finnish word, and there are around three million saunas for some five and a half million people: in flats and houses, at cottages, gyms and workplaces, even in Parliament. In 2020 Finnish sauna culture was added to UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Each sauna emoji has its job. 🔥 and 🪵 are the wood-fired stove, 🪣 is the bucket, and 💧 is water thrown on the hot stones to raise löyly, the wave of steam that is the whole point. 🌿 stands for the vihta or vasta (the word depends on which part of Finland you are from), a bundle of leafy birch twigs used to whisk the skin. ♨️ and 🥵 say the rest. Then the cool-down: 🏊 into the lake in summer, 🧊 into an avanto, a hole cut in the ice, in winter, followed by 🌭 saunamakkara, a sausage grilled on the stove or the fire, and a cold 🍺.

The sauna's natural home is the mökki 🏡, the summer cottage by the water. Finland is usually counted as having about 188,000 lakes, and hundreds of thousands of families have a cottage on one: 🛶 rowing out in the evening, 🎣 fishing for perch and pike, 🏞️ walking in one of the national parks. 🏡🛶☀️ is the whole Finnish summer in three characters.

Finland emoji for forests, Lapland and winter

About three quarters of Finland is forest, which makes it the most forested country in Europe. 🌲 is the spruce and pine, 🌳 stands in for the silver birch, the national tree, which has no emoji of its own. Everyman's right, jokamiehenoikeus, lets anyone walk those woods and pick 🫐 bilberries, 🍓 wild strawberries and 🍄 mushrooms, even on private land, so late-summer feeds fill with buckets of berries and chanterelles.

Out in the forest live 🫎 moose, hirvi, the animal on Finland's warning road signs, and 🐺 wolves, 🦊 foxes, 🦉 owls and 🦆 ducks. In Lapland roam about 200,000 🦌 reindeer, every one of them owned by a herder. 🦭 is for the Saimaa ringed seal, one of the rarest seals in the world: it lives only in Lake Saimaa, a few hundred animals in all. 🐟 covers the fish on every Finnish table, from perch and vendace to salmon.

In the northernmost parts of Finland the sun stays up for weeks around Midsummer ☀️🌅 and in winter does not rise at all; that dark season is kaamos. The northern lights have no emoji, so people use 🌌 and ✨. Finnish calls them revontulet, fox fires, after an old tale of an arctic fox 🦊 sweeping sparks into the sky with its tail. Winter is ❄️ ☃️ and 🥶, 🎿 cross-country skiing and ⛷️ downhill, 🛷 sledding and ⛸️ skating on frozen lakes. And 🎅 is not just any Santa: Finnish children's Joulupukki lives on Korvatunturi fell in Lapland, and Santa Claus Village stands on the Arctic Circle at Rovaniemi.

Finnish food and holiday emoji: Vappu, Midsummer and Independence Day

🍞 is ruisleipä, dark sour rye bread, eaten at almost every meal. 🥧 is the closest emoji to karjalanpiirakka, the Karelian pie, a thin rye crust folded round rice porridge and eaten with egg butter. 🍲🥞 is Thursday: pea soup followed by oven pancake with jam, served in schools and the army for generations. 🧀 is leipäjuusto, the baked cheese that squeaks on the teeth and is often dropped into ☕ coffee. 🦞 stands in for the crayfish of August crayfish parties, 🥔 for new potatoes with dill, 🍬 for salmiakki, the salty liquorice Finns love and visitors fear, and 🍫 for Fazer's blue-wrapped milk chocolate. Finns are counted among the heaviest coffee drinkers in the world, usually first per person, and drink plenty of 🥛 milk too; 🥃 is for Finnish vodka.

Vappu, May Day and its eve, is the loudest holiday: students and graduates put on their white student caps 🎓, the streets fill with 🎈 balloons, and people drink sima, a home-made lemon 🍋 mead, with 🍩 munkki doughnuts, then picnic in the parks on 1 May with 🍾🥂🎉. Juhannus, Midsummer, falls on the Saturday between 20 and 26 June and is also Finnish Flag Day: the flag 🇫🇮 goes up on Midsummer Eve and flies through the light night while people head to cottages for 🧖, 🔥 bonfires and 🛶.

Independence Day, 6 December, marks the declaration of independence in 1917. It is quiet and dignified: two 🕯️ candles in the windows in the evening and the president's reception on television, so 🇫🇮🕯️🕯️ is the post of the day. Christmas brings 🎄, Joulupukki 🎅 and a Christmas Eve sauna. At Easter, children dress up as little witches 🧙 and go door to door with decorated willow twigs, reciting a blessing in exchange for chocolate eggs 🐣. Runeberg's Day, 5 February, comes with 🧁 Runeberg torte, named after the national poet, and New Year with 🎆.

Finland sports, metal and Moomin emoji: 🏒 🤘 🦛

🏒 Ice hockey is the sport that stops the country. The Lions have won the world championship in 1995, 2011, 2019 and 2022 and Olympic gold in 2022, and 🏒🦁🇫🇮 floods feeds whenever they play. ⚾ stands for pesäpallo, Finnish baseball, the national sport, developed in the 1920s by Lauri Pihkala, in which the pitcher tosses the ball straight up over home plate. ⚽ goes with 🦉: the men's football team are Huuhkajat, the Eagle-Owls, after an eagle owl landed on the pitch during a match in Helsinki in 2007, and in 2021 they played their first major tournament. 🏃 is for Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn with nine Olympic golds; 🏎️ for Formula One champions Keke Rosberg, Mika Häkkinen and Kimi Räikkönen; 🚗 for rallying, where Finnish drivers have won many world titles and Rally Finland jumps its cars over the forest roads round Jyväskylä.

Finland is often counted as having the most heavy metal bands per person in the world, so 🤘🎸 is a national gesture: Nightwish, HIM and Children of Bodom, and the monster band Lordi, who won Eurovision 🎤 in 2006. 🎸 is also the Air Guitar World Championships, held in Oulu every summer. 🎼 is Jean Sibelius, whose Finlandia became the country's unofficial hymn.

🦛 is how fans write the Moomins, the round white trolls of Tove Jansson's books (they are not hippos, but the emoji is the nearest shape). 📖 is the Kalevala, the epic Elias Lönnrot compiled from folk poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, celebrated on 28 February. Finnish tech has its own set: 📱 Nokia, 🐧 Linux, which Linus Torvalds started as a Helsinki student in 1991, and 🎮🐦 for Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, both made in Finland. 🩲🍺 is kalsarikännit, drinking at home in your underwear with no plan to go out, a word Finland put in its own official emoji set in 2015. And 🗳️ is a point of pride: in 1906 Finland gave women the vote, the first in Europe, and the first anywhere to let women stand for parliament. For places, 🏰 is the Suomenlinna sea fortress off Helsinki or Olavinlinna castle in Savonlinna, ⛪ the white Helsinki Cathedral, 🏙️ Helsinki itself, 🚋 its green trams, and ⛴️🚢 the big ferries to Tallinn and Stockholm.

Finnish symbols: letters ä ö å, the euro € and how to type them

Finnish is written with A–Z plus Å, Ä and Ö, which come at the end of the alphabet in that order. Ä and Ö are letters of their own, not a and o with decoration, and they are everywhere: they change words, as in tähti (star) and tahti (beat), sää (weather) and saa (may), and names like Jyväskylä, Hämeenlinna and Mäntsälä are wrong without them. Å appears in Finnish in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian names and their derivatives. Š and Ž are used in some loanwords and transliterated names, such as Tšekki (Czechia) and Tšaikovski; where they cannot be typed, sh and zh are written instead. Swedish, Finland's second national language, uses the same Å Ä Ö; it is the mother tongue of about 5 percent of Finns, along the south and west coasts and in Åland, which is why towns there have two names, Helsinki and Helsingfors, Turku and Åbo. By CLDR's estimates about 5.3 million people in Finland speak Finnish and nearly 4 million English, most of them as a second language. The full alphabets are in our Finnish and Swedish collections.

How to type ä, ö and å: a Finnish keyboard has its own keys, Å to the right of P and Ö and Ä to the right of L. On an English keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type 0228 for ä, 0196 Ä, 0246 ö, 0214 Ö, 0229 å and 0197 Å on the number pad; with the US-International layout, type " then the vowel. On a Mac press Option + U and then a or o for ä and ö, and Option + A for å. On a phone, long-press A or O. In HTML write ä, ö, å, š and ž.

Finland has used the euro since 1999, with notes and coins since 2002, when it gave up the markka: € as a text sign, 💶 and 🪙 as emoji. Finns write prices with a decimal comma and the sign after a space, 12,50 €, and cash totals are rounded to the nearest 5 cents. To type € on a Finnish keyboard press AltGr + E; elsewhere on Windows Alt + 0128, on a Mac Option + Shift + 2, and in HTML €. Finnish quotation marks are their own too: the same closing mark at both ends, ”Moi”, and in books sometimes »Moi», with ’ for single quotes. Among Finnish symbols to copy and paste is also ⌘, the hannunvaakuna or St John's arms, an old protective folk sign carved into buildings and used in the Nordic countries to mark sights; it is the same character as the Mac command key. Next door are our Åland Islands, Sweden, Norway and Estonia collections; Estonian is Finnish's closest big relative.