France Emoji

🇫🇷 is not a picture stored in Unicode but two letters: the regional indicators 🇫 and 🇷, France's country code FR. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the blue, white and red tricolour. France was one of the ten country flags in Japanese carriers' original emoji sets; Unicode 6.0 added regional-indicator symbols in 2010, making many more flags representable.

Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there 🇫🇷 shows up as the letters FR. It still arrives as a flag on the other person's phone. If you want the colours to show everywhere, people spell the tricolour with hearts 💙🤍❤️ or squares 🟦⬜🟥, always in that order, blue at the hoist. Next to it you often see 🇪🇺, because France is a founding member of the European Union.

France emoji and what they mean

🐓 the rooster is France's unofficial national animal, the coq gaulois: in Latin gallus means both a rooster and a Gaul. It is on the French football team's badge and crows on rugby shirts, so fans send 🐓🇫🇷 on match days. ⚜️ the fleur-de-lis was the emblem of the French kings, and ☨ the Cross of Lorraine was the sign of de Gaulle's Free French from 1940.

There is no Eiffel Tower emoji. People use 🗼, which is officially Tokyo Tower, a 1958 red-and-white tower modelled on Gustave Eiffel's. 🗽 belongs here too: the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, sculpted by Bartholdi on an iron frame designed by Eiffel's company. For Paris itself people add 🌉 for the bridges over the Seine, 🎠 for its old carousels, 🚇 for the Métro and 🔒❤️ for the love locks that once covered the Pont des Arts.

Food does most of the talking: 🥖 the baguette, 🥐 the croissant, 🧀 cheese, 🍷 wine and 🍾 champagne, which may only carry that name if it comes from the Champagne region. 🥞 stands in for crêpes, 🍮 for crème caramel or crème brûlée, 🦪 for the oysters of Christmas and New Year, 🐌 for escargots and 🫕 for the fondue of the Savoie Alps. 🪻 is the closest emoji to the lavender fields of Provence.

French holidays and the emoji people send

The national day is the 14th of July, called le 14 Juillet or la Fête nationale in France and Bastille Day in English. It remembers the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ends with fireworks, the best known of them at the Eiffel Tower: 🇫🇷🎆🗼 is the classic message.

In January families share a galette des rois: whoever finds the little charm (the fève) in their slice wears the paper crown, hence 👑🥧. On 2 February, la Chandeleur, everyone makes crêpes 🥞. On 1 April children tape paper fish to people's backs and shout « Poisson d'avril ! » 🐟. At Easter French children are told the church bells 🔔 fly to Rome and come back with chocolate, and on 21 June, the Fête de la Musique, there is free music in every street 🎶.

Sport: Les Bleus, the Tour de France and Paris 2024

⚽🏆 is for Les Bleus, world champions in 1998 and 2018. 🚴 is the Tour de France, which began in 1903 and usually finishes in Paris; the leader wears the yellow jersey. 🎾 means Roland-Garros, the French Open played on red clay, 🏉 the rugby team that hosted the 2023 World Cup, 🏎️ the 24 Hours of Le Mans and ⛷️ the Alps.

🤺 has a French accent of its own: fencing is refereed in French, from en garde to allez, and 🏅 brings back Paris 2024, the third Olympic Games the city has hosted after 1900 and 1924.

French accent letters and the euro sign

French writes 16 letters beyond A–Z, each in capital and small form: à â æ ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü ÿ. The acute é is by far the most common (été, café). The grave tells words apart: a (has) and à (to), ou (or) and où (where); ù appears in no other word than où. The circumflex often marks an s that dropped out long ago, as in forêt (forest), hôpital, île (isle). The cedilla softens c before a, o and u: ça, garçon, français. The diaeresis says the vowel is pronounced on its own: Noël, naïf, maïs, and ÿ survives only in names such as L'Haÿ-les-Roses. œ is required in cœur, sœur and œuf, æ only in a few Latin words like ex æquo.

On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, ç, à and ù have their own keys, and ^ or ¨ is pressed before the vowel. Elsewhere: on Windows hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0232 è, 0231 ç, 0224 à, 0156 œ, 0201 É, 0171 « and 0187 »; on a Mac use Option+E then the letter for an acute, Option+` for a grave, Option+I for a circumflex, Option+U for a diaeresis, Option+C for ç, Option+Q for œ and Option+\ for «; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The Académie française asks for accents on capitals too: École, État.

France pays in euros, and the French put the sign after the number with a space: 12,50 €. On Windows it is Alt+0128, or AltGr+E on French and most European keyboards. The franc, written F or FF, remained in cash use until the 2002 changeover; the euro had been France's accounting currency since 1999. The ₣ sign was proposed by the finance minister in 1988 and never caught on. Before the franc, until 1795, the money of account was the livre tournois ₶. The guillemets « » are France's quotation marks, with a space inside: « Bonjour ».

Overseas France and France's other languages

France does not end in Europe. Guadeloupe 🇬🇵, Martinique 🇲🇶, French Guiana 🇬🇫, Réunion 🇷🇪 and Mayotte 🇾🇹 are full French departments that use the euro, and French Polynesia 🇵🇫, New Caledonia 🇳🇨, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon 🇵🇲, Saint-Barthélemy 🇧🇱, Saint-Martin 🇲🇫 and Wallis and Futuna 🇼🇫 are French territories too. Several of these flags are drawn as the plain tricolour on some phones, because that is the official flag they fly.

About 68 million people live in France (a CLDR estimate), and French is the language nearly all of them use. Regional languages are still spoken: Occitan in the south, Breton in Brittany, Alsatian (a form of German) in Alsace, Basque, Corsican, Catalan and Picard; each with letters of its own, covered in our Occitan, Breton and Catalan collections. For French beyond France, see French-speaking Belgium and Canada, and our French collection for the language itself.