Gambia Emoji & Symbols

The Gambia flag emoji 🇬🇲 shows three horizontal bands, red, blue and green, with the blue band edged by two thin white stripes. The flag was adopted at independence on 18 February 1965. Red stands for the sun and the savanna, blue for the River Gambia that runs through the whole country, green for the forests and farmland, and the white stripes for peace and unity. Its red, blue and green flag has no star or emblem and uses neither of the two full Pan-African colour sets, which makes it easy to recognise even at emoji size.

The Gambia flag emoji 🇬🇲 is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇬 and 🇲, spelling the country code GM. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters GM instead, though a friend reading on a phone still sees the flag.

Without the flag, people spell it in squares, 🟥🟦🟩, or in hearts, ❤️💙💚, often with ⬜ or 🤍 for the white stripes. The coat of arms shows two lions holding an axe and a hoe for farming, under the motto Progress, Peace, Prosperity, so 🦁 and 🪓 sometimes join them.

River Gambia, wildlife and the Smiling Coast

The Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa: a narrow strip of land along both banks of the River Gambia, surrounded by Senegal 🇸🇳 on every side except its short Atlantic coast. The river is in almost every picture of the country, so 🛶 for the painted fishing pirogues, ⛴️ for the Banjul–Barra ferry and 🌊 fit almost any post.

Upriver, in River Gambia National Park, hippos 🦛 live in the channels and chimpanzees rescued from captivity have been rehabilitated on the Baboon Islands since 1979; there is no chimp emoji, so 🐒 stands in, as it does for the vervet and red colobus monkeys of Bijilo Forest Park near the coast. In Bakau, the sacred crocodile pool of Kachikally 🐊 is visited by women hoping for children and by tourists, who may touch the calm crocodiles. The country is famous among birdwatchers, which is where 🐦, 🦅 and 🦜 come in, and the Gambian pouched rat 🐀, a large African rodent named after the country, is a well-known animal in its own right.

On the coast, the country calls itself the Smiling Coast of Africa, and 😊🏖️☀️ is the usual way to say it: beaches, palm trees 🌴 and sunsets 🌅 over the Atlantic draw winter visitors from Europe.

Kunta Kinteh Island, stone circles and history

Kunta Kinteh Island, in the river near the village of Juffureh, was a fort and trading post where enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic. It was called James Island until 2011, when it was renamed after Kunta Kinte, the Mandinka ancestor from Juffureh in Alex Haley's Roots. With related sites on both banks it has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2003. People writing about it use 🏝️ for the island and ⛓️‍💥, the broken chain, for freedom and remembrance.

Further upriver, the Wassu stone circles 🪨 are part of the Senegambian Stone Circles, more than a thousand rings of standing stones shared with Senegal and listed by UNESCO in 2006.

The Gambia became independent from Britain 🇬🇧 on 18 February 1965, its Independence Day, celebrated with 🇬🇲🎆🎉, and became a republic on 24 April 1970. The capital, Banjul, was called Bathurst until 1973. In 1964, before independence, Prime Minister Dawda Jawara requested that the article be retained in the name The Gambia, partly to avoid confusion with Zambia.

Gambian food emoji: benachin, domoda, yassa and attaya

Benachin, Wolof for "one pot", is rice cooked in a tomato sauce with fish or meat and vegetables; it is the Gambian form of the West African dish known abroad as jollof, a name that itself comes from the old Wolof kingdom of Jolof. 🍚, 🍛 and 🍲 stand for it. Domoda, a rich groundnut stew over rice, is often called the national dish: 🥜🍲🍚. Groundnuts are also the country's traditional cash crop, so 🥜 and 🧑‍🌾 go together. Yassa, chicken or fish in a sharp sauce of onions and lemon, is 🍗🧅🍋, and 🌶️ sits on the side of most plates.

From the coast and the mangrove creeks come fish 🐟, prawns 🦐 and the oysters 🦪 that women harvest from mangrove roots in the Tanbi wetlands near Banjul. Rice paddies 🌾 line the river upcountry, mangoes 🥭 fill the markets in season, and the small crusty loaf called tapalapa is the everyday bread: 🥖.

Attaya is the green tea ritual of the whole Senegambia region: gunpowder tea boiled with plenty of sugar, often with mint, poured from high up to raise a foam and served in three rounds over a long conversation. 🍵🫖 means attaya time. Wonjo, a deep red drink made from hibiscus flowers, is 🌺.

Kora, wrestling and the Scorpions

The kora, a 21-string harp-lute made from a large calabash, is the instrument of the Mandinka griots, the jali families who keep history and praise songs. There is no kora emoji, so people borrow 🪕, with 🎶. Drums 🥁 and 🪘 drive dances 💃 at naming ceremonies and weddings. The Kankurang, a Mandinka masked figure covered in bark fibre who protects boys during initiation, is recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage of the Gambia and Senegal; 🎭 is the closest emoji.

Traditional wrestling 🤼, with drums and chants around the arena, is hugely popular. Football ⚽ is the national passion, and the national team is called the Scorpions, so 🇬🇲⚽🦂 is the cheer. They reached their first Africa Cup of Nations at the 2021 edition, played in Cameroon in early 2022, and went all the way to the quarter-finals.

Gambian languages, letters and the dalasi

English is the official language of the Gambia, used in government, schools and the press, and CLDR estimates around a million speakers. Everyday life runs in the country's own languages: Mandinka (CLDR estimates around 730,000 speakers), Wolof, the common language of Banjul and the coast, Fula, Jola, Serahule and others. Mandinka and Wolof are written with ŋ (eng, the "ng" sound of sing) and ñ (the "ny" sound), Wolof also uses à é ë ó to mark its vowels, and Fula writes the hooked letters ɓ ɗ ƴ for its implosive and glottalized sounds. Mandinka is also written in N’Ko, the right-to-left West African script created in 1949 by Solomana Kanté; the Mandingo, Mandingo (N’Ko) and English collections cover those writing systems in full.

To type them on Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0241 ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0233 é, 0235 ë, 0224 à, 0243 ó. Letters outside that set, like ŋ, ɓ, ɗ and ƴ, can be typed in Word by entering their code (014B for ŋ, 0253 for ɓ, 0257 for ɗ, 01B4 for ƴ) and pressing Alt + X. On a Mac, Option + N then n gives ñ and Option + E then e gives é; the rest are in the Character Viewer. In HTML, ñ is ñ and ŋ is ŋ. Or tap them in the grid above.

The currency is the dalasi, code GMD, divided into 100 bututs; it replaced the Gambian pound in 1971. It has no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written with a capital D before the amount, as in D500, or with the code, GMD 500.