French Polynesia & Tahiti Emoji

The French Polynesia flag emoji 🇵🇫 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, P and F (the territory's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; it arrived with most other country and territory flags in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters PF instead, but the text is the same and shows as a flag on the reader's phone. There is no separate Tahiti or Bora Bora flag emoji: 🇵🇫 is the one people use for every island, from Tahiti and Moorea to the Marquesas.

The flag was adopted in 1984. It has three horizontal stripes, red, white and red, with the white band twice as tall, and its red and white echo the flag of the old Kingdom of Tahiti. In the middle sits a round emblem: a Polynesian double-hulled canoe 🛶 carrying five small figures, one for each of the five archipelagos, in front of a golden sun ☀️ over blue and white waves 🌊. Pasted as hearts the flag becomes ❤️🤍❤️, and 🛶☀️🌊 spells out the emblem when you want it in emoji.

French Polynesia emoji: lagoons, tiare and black pearls

French Polynesia is 118 islands scattered across the South Pacific in five archipelagos: the Society Islands (Tahiti, Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea, Tahaʻa, Bora Bora), the low coral atolls of the Tuamotus, the Gambier, the Marquesas and the Austral Islands. 🏝️🌴🥥 and 🏖️🌅 cover the atolls and their white sand; 🌋⛰️ are the high volcanic islands, such as Bora Bora with the dark peak of Mount Otemanu above its lagoon. 🛖 is the nearest emoji to the fare, the thatched Polynesian house, and with 🏨 it is how people post the overwater bungalows the islands are famous for.

The tiare (Gardenia taitensis), a white, star-shaped, sweet-smelling flower, is the national flower. Unicode has no tiare, so people use 🌼 or 🌺 for it and for the flower crowns and garlands given to visitors on arrival; tiare flowers soaked in coconut oil make monoï 🥥🌼. A popular saying holds that a flower behind the left ear means the wearer is taken and behind the right means they are free. 🦪🖤 is the Tahitian black pearl, grown in the black-lipped oyster on pearl farms in the lagoons of the Tuamotus and the Gambier, in shades from silver and green to near black. Offshore, humpback whales 🐋 come to raise their calves in the southern winter, best known around Rurutu and Moorea; hundreds of grey reef sharks 🦈 gather in the passes of Fakarava, dolphins 🐬 play in Rangiroa's Tiputa pass, and turtles 🐢 and reef fish 🐠 fill the coral 🪸.

Tahitian food emoji: poisson cru, the ahimaʻa and Chinese-Tahitian dishes

The national dish is poisson cru, in Tahitian iʻa ota: raw tuna 🐟 cut in cubes, "cooked" in lime juice 🍋‍🟩 and finished with fresh coconut milk 🥥, cucumber and tomato. For a feast, families cook in the ahimaʻa, an earth oven of hot stones 🔥 covered with leaves: a whole pig 🐖, breadfruit (uru) and taro, for which 🍠 has to stand in, and bananas 🍌, among them the red mountain plantain feʻi. 🍮 is poʻe, a sticky pudding of fruit such as banana or papaya with coconut cream, and 🍩☕ is the Sunday-morning firifiri, twisted doughnuts eaten with coffee.

Two other kitchens are part of everyday life. From France come the baguette 🥖, bought fresh every morning, and the café. From the Chinese families who settled from the 1860s come chao men 🍜 (fried noodles) and maʻa tinito 🫘, red beans stewed with pork and macaroni. In Papeete the evening roulottes, food trucks on the waterfront, serve all of it side by side. Moorea grows sweet pineapples 🍍, mangoes 🥭 drop from trees everywhere, Hinano is the local beer 🍺, and Tahaʻa is known as the vanilla island for its Vanilla tahitensis, though Unicode has no vanilla emoji.

Heiva, ʻori Tahiti and the vaʻa: dance, music and sport

The Heiva i Tahiti, held every July in Papeete, grew out of festivities first held in 1881 and is the great festival of Polynesian culture: competitions of ʻori Tahiti dance 💃🕺, with fast hip movements to the beat of the toʻere, a slit log drum, and the big pahu drum 🥁; himene, the many-voiced church and traditional choirs 🎶; and the Tahitian ukulele 🎸 heard in every gathering. Its traditional sports include stone lifting 🪨, fruit-carrier races with heavy poles of bananas 🍌 on the shoulder, and javelin throwing.

The national sport is vaʻa, outrigger canoe racing 🛶🚣. Every year the Hawaiki Nui Vaʻa race takes crews across the open ocean from Huahine to Raiatea, Tahaʻa and Bora Bora. Surfers 🏄 know Teahupoʻo, at the end of the road on Tahiti Iti, for one of the heaviest waves in the world; it hosted the surfing events of the Paris 2024 Olympics, and local surfer Kauli Vaast won gold there. In football ⚽, Tahiti won the 2012 OFC Nations Cup, the first team other than Australia or New Zealand to do so, and went on to the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil; the beach soccer team reached the final of the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup in 2015 and 2017 🏆.

Holidays in French Polynesia and the emoji people send

Most Polynesians are Christian, Protestant or Catholic, and Sunday church ⛪✝️ with its himene is a centre of village life. 5 March, the Arrival of the Gospel, is a public holiday marking the day in 1797 when missionaries of the London Missionary Society landed at Matavai Bay on Tahiti. July belongs to the Heiva, which overlaps with France's national day on 14 July, so 🇵🇫🎉 and 🎆 run all month. Matariʻi i niʻa, around 20 November, when the Pleiades rise at dusk and open the season of plenty, is now a public holiday too, and ✨🌌⭐ is how it is posted.

The Chinese community, which CLDR estimates at around 24,000 speakers of Chinese, celebrates Chinese New Year with a parade, dragon and lion dances 🐉 and firecrackers in Papeete, with 🧧🏮 for the red envelopes and lanterns. Tahiti keeps time at UTC−10, the same as Hawaii, while the Marquesas run at UTC−9:30 and the Gambier at UTC−9, so New Year's fireworks 🎆 in Papeete come almost a day after Sydney's.

Tahitian letters ā ʻ, French accents and the CFP franc

French is the official language, and nearly all of the roughly 300,000 people (CLDR estimates) speak it; see our French collection for its letters in full. In the grid above are the French letters with diacritics—é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô ù û ü ÿ—the ligatures œ and æ, and the guillemets « » it uses for quotes. Polynesians type them on French AZERTY keyboards, where é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys; on a US keyboard in Windows use Alt codes such as Alt + 0233 for é and Alt + 0231 for ç, on a Mac hold the letter or use Option + E then e, and on a phone long-press the letter.

Tahitian (reo Tahiti or reo māʻohi) is spoken across the islands alongside Marquesan, Paumotu, Mangarevan and the Austral languages. Its alphabet has 14 letters: a e f h i m n o p r t u v and ʻ, plus the macron for long vowels. The macron (tārava) on ā ē ī ō ū marks a long vowel, as in māuruuru (thank you), and the ʻeta, ʻ, marks a glottal stop that changes words: tai is the sea, taʻi is to cry. Place names carry it too, such as Faʻaʻā, where the airport is, and Teahupoʻo. The correct character is U+02BB, the modifier letter turned comma; a plain apostrophe looks similar but is punctuation, not a letter. Copy ʻ from the grid, type 02BB then Alt + X in Word, or use ʻ in HTML; for the macron vowels, long-press on a phone or switch a Mac to the ABC – Extended input source and press Option + A then the vowel. In everyday writing the marks are often left out: Ia orana for ʻIa ora na.

The money is the CFP franc (code XPF), shared with New Caledonia 🇳🇨 and Wallis and Futuna 🇼🇫. Prices are written 1 000 F or 1 000 XPF; the French franc sign ₣ (U+20A3) is not the CFP franc's symbol. CFP originally referred to Colonies françaises du Pacifique; since 2022, its official name is franc des collectivités françaises du Pacifique, and the franc is pegged to the euro: 1 000 F is 8.38 €.