Ghana Emoji

🇬🇭 the Ghana flag emoji shows three horizontal bands, red, gold and green, with a black five-pointed star in the middle. It is encoded as a pair of regional indicator symbols, 🇬 and 🇭, for Ghana's country code GH; phones and Macs display the pair as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you may see the letters GH instead, but the person you send it to will still see the flag on their phone.

The flag was designed by Theodosia Okoh and first raised when the Gold Coast became independent Ghana on 6 March 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah. Red is for the blood of those who fought for independence, gold for the country's mineral wealth, green for its forests and farms, and the black star for African freedom, which is why Ghana's national football team is nicknamed the Black Stars. For a few years in the 1960s the gold band was replaced by white; the original was restored in 1966.

Where flags don't show, people spell the colours out: ❤️💛💚 or 🟥🟨🟩, often with ★ in the middle. That ★ is fittingly named BLACK STAR in Unicode (U+2605), and ⭐ is the gold emoji star people use for the same idea. The coat of arms adds two more symbols: two golden eagles 🦅 hold up the shield, a gold lion 🦁 sits at its centre, and the motto reads Freedom and Justice. 🌍 is the usual sign-off for anything pan-African, a role Ghana has embraced since Nkrumah.

Cedi sign ₵: how to type it, and why people write GH¢

₵ is the cedi sign, a C crossed by a vertical stroke, Unicode U+20B5. The word cedi comes from the Akan word for the cowrie shell, once used as money. Today's Ghana cedi (code GHS) was introduced in 2007, when 10,000 old cedis became one new one, and it is divided into 100 pesewas. Prices are written GH₵ 20 or GHS 20.

Because ₵ is missing from most keyboards, many Ghanaians write GH¢ with the ordinary cent sign ¢ instead, and you'll see both on shop signs and receipts. To type ₵ in Microsoft Word, type 20B5 and press Alt+X; in HTML use ₵. ¢ is easier: Alt+0162 on a Windows number pad, Option+4 on a Mac. 💰 and 🪙 are the money emoji, and ⛏️ recalls the gold that gave the Gold Coast its name and still makes Ghana one of Africa's biggest gold producers.

Twi, Ewe and Ga letters to copy and paste: ɛ ɔ ŋ ɖ ƒ ɣ ʋ

English is Ghana's official language, but most Ghanaians also speak at least one of its own languages, and the biggest ones are written with extra letters. Akan, whose best-known forms are Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi and Fante, is spoken by an estimated 13.5 million people in Ghana. Its alphabet adds Ɛ ɛ, an open e as in "bet", and Ɔ ɔ, an open o as in "law": Ɛte sɛn? means "How are you?" and Me dɔ wo "I love you". Ga, the language of Accra (about 1 million speakers), uses ɛ and ɔ too, plus Ŋ ŋ, the ng sound of "sing".

Ewe, spoken by an estimated 3.8 million people in Ghana, mostly in the Volta Region, and by many more across the border in Togo, has the most: ɛ, ɔ and ŋ, and also Ɖ ɖ, a d made with the tongue curled back; Ƒ ƒ, an f blown through both lips; Ɣ ɣ, a soft throaty g; and Ʋ ʋ, a sound between v and w. The language's own name for itself is Eʋegbe. Watch the look-alikes: ɛ is not the Greek ε, ɣ is not the Greek γ, and ƒ is the same character used as the florin sign.

To type them, add a Twi (Akan) or Ewe keyboard on your phone, or copy them from this page. On Windows in Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 014B for ŋ, 0256 for ɖ. In casual chat, some people write 3 for ɛ and ) for ɔ ("3te s3n" shows the ɛ substitution), but names and signs look right with the real letters. For full alphabets see the Akan, Ewe and Ga collections, and the English and Hausa ones for the languages many Ghanaians share across regions; Frafra, Nzima, Adangme and Abron have their own pages too.

Ghanaian food emoji: jollof, waakye, fufu and kelewele

There's no jollof emoji, so Ghanaians build it: 🍛 or 🍚 with 🍅🌶️🧅 for the tomato and pepper base and 🍗 on the side. The jollof rivalry with Nigeria is a long-running friendly argument, and 🇬🇭🍛 vs 🇳🇬🍛 is how it starts. 🍚🫘 is waakye, rice and beans cooked together and eaten for breakfast across the country, and 🫘🍌 is red red, bean stew with fried plantain.

🍌🌶️ is kelewele, spicy fried plantain cubes sold by the roadside at night. 🌽🐟🌶️ is kenkey, the fermented corn dough of the coast, with fried fish and shito, the black pepper sauce. 🥣🍲 stands for fufu with light soup, palm nut soup or groundnut soup 🥜, with 🐐 for goat meat and 🥬 for kontomire, cocoyam leaves; 🍠 and 🫜 stand in for yam and cassava. 🍫 is Ghana's cocoa: the country is the world's second-largest cocoa grower after Côte d'Ivoire. 🍍🥭🥥 are the fruit sold on every corner, 🌺 is the hibiscus that sobolo is brewed from, 🌴 the palm that gives palm wine and palm oil, and 🍺 a cold beer after work.

Black Stars, highlife, kente and the coffin dance

Football is the national passion. ⚽🇬🇭⭐ cheers the Black Stars, who have won the Africa Cup of Nations four times (1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982) and reached the World Cup quarter-finals in 2010; the women's team are the Black Queens. 🥊 belongs to Accra's boxing heartland of Jamestown and Bukom, home of champions such as Azumah Nelson.

🎸🎺🎶 is highlife, the guitar and horn music that grew up in Ghana in the 20th century, and 🎤🎶💃🕺 its younger heirs, hiplife and Afrobeats. 🪘 is the closest emoji to the talking drums of Akan courts, which can speak proverbs and names, and 👑 stands for the chiefs and kings, the Asantehene above all. 🧵 is kente, the woven silk-and-cotton cloth of the Asante and Ewe weavers, and 🎓 the kente stole worn at graduations from Accra to the United States.

⚰️🕺 is the coffin dance: in 2020 a video of Ghanaian pallbearers dancing with a coffin became one of the world's biggest memes. It comes from a real tradition of joyful funerals, and Ga carpenters in Teshie are famous for fantasy coffins shaped like fish, cars or cocoa pods.

Ghanaian holidays, Accra and everyday life emoji

Independence Day on 6 March is 🇬🇭🎉🎆 and "Happy Independence Day, Ghana ❤️💛💚". Christmas 🎄⛪ is the biggest family time of the year, greeted with Afehyia pa, and 🙏 ends most messages of thanks and prayer. 🌙🕌 is for Eid; Larabanga in the north has one of the oldest mud mosques in West Africa. Festivals carry the year: the Ga celebrate Homowo, "hooting at hunger", with kpokpoi made from corn 🌽; in Winneba the Aboakyer festival sends two companies racing to catch a live antelope, for which 🦌 is the nearest emoji; and National Farmers' Day in December honours farmers and fishers 🧑‍🌾.

🏙️ is Accra, 🏖️ its beaches like Labadi, and 🏰 the castles at Cape Coast and Elmina, later used in the Atlantic slave trade and now visited as places of memory. Getting around: 🚐 the trotro minibus, 🏍️ the okada motorbike taxi and 🛶 the painted fishing canoes along the coast. 💡 is dumsor, "off-on" in Twi, the word for power cuts. 🌊 is Lake Volta, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world.

🏞️ is Kakum National Park and its canopy walkway high in the rainforest, 🐘 the elephants of Mole National Park, 🐊 the sacred crocodiles of Paga that people famously sit beside, and 🐒 the monkeys protected by the villages of Boabeng-Fiema.