Guadeloupe Emoji

🇬🇵 is made of two regional indicator letters, 🇬 and 🇵, Guadeloupe's country code GP. Your phone decides what to draw for the pair, and phones disagree. Guadeloupe is part of France, so its only official flag is the French tricolour 🇫🇷, and some phones simply draw that. Others draw the local flag people fly on the island: a gold sun and green sugarcane under a blue band of gold fleurs-de-lis. Windows has no flag pictures at all and shows the letters GP; the person you send it to sees a flag only if their platform supports it.

That is why Guadeloupeans often add something that shows the island whatever the phone does: 🇬🇵🦋, the département number 971 (every Guadeloupe postcode starts with it), or the nickname Gwada. Some people also post the green, yellow and red flag with a star used by the independence movement, which has no emoji of its own and looks a lot like Suriname's. 🇪🇺 belongs here too: Guadeloupe is one of the EU's outermost regions, so it is in the European Union and pays in euros.

Guadeloupe emoji and what they mean

🦋 is the island itself. Seen on a map, the two main islands, Basse-Terre in the west and Grande-Terre in the east, spread out like two wings separated by a narrow channel, the Rivière Salée, so Guadeloupe is called l'île papillon, the butterfly island. Around them lie Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, La Désirade and the uninhabited Petite-Terre, reached by boat ⛴️. Before Columbus arrived in 1493 and named it after the monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe in Spain, the Kalinago called it Karukera, usually translated as the island of beautiful waters.

🌋 is La Soufrière, the active volcano at the top of Basse-Terre and the highest point of the Lesser Antilles at about 1,467 m. Around it the rainforest of the Parc national de la Guadeloupe 🏞️🌿 hides waterfalls such as the Chutes du Carbet; the park once used the raccoon as an emblem 🦝. There is no hummingbird emoji, though the colibri, the hummingbird of Guadeloupe's gardens and forests, is a familiar sight, so people send 🐦 or 🌺 instead. Grande-Terre is the flat side, with white beaches 🏖️, and the cliffs of Pointe des Châteaux, where people go to watch the sunrise 🌅.

🥃 is rum. Guadeloupe makes rhum agricole from fresh sugarcane juice, and Marie-Galante is famous for rum bottled at 59 %. A ti-punch is rum, a slice of lime 🍋‍🟩 and cane sugar, and 🥃🍋‍🟩 is how it is written in emoji.

Gwoka, zouk and carnival

🪘 is gwoka, the music of the ka drums, played seated astride the drum. It grew out of the music of enslaved Africans and since 2014 it has been on UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. A léwòz is an evening of gwoka where singers, drummers and dancers answer each other in a circle, and 🪘💃🔥 is its emoji. 🎶💃🕺 is zouk, the dance music of the French Antilles made famous in the 1980s by the band Kassav', founded in 1979 by Pierre-Édouard Décimus and Jacob Desvarieux.

Carnival 🎭🥁🎉 starts in January and runs every Sunday until Mardi Gras, with groups marching to skin drums through Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre. On Ash Wednesday everyone dresses in black and white 🖤🤍 and Vaval, the king of carnival, is burned 🔥. In August the Fête des Cuisinières sends Pointe-à-Pitre's women cooks 🧑‍🍳 through the streets in madras dresses with baskets of food, in honour of Saint Laurent, their patron saint.

In December families and friends meet for chanté Nwèl, evenings of Christmas carols 🎄🎶 with ham and pigeon peas 🫘. On the night of Toussaint, 1 November, the cemeteries glow with candles 🕯️; the one at Morne-à-l'Eau, with its black and white checkerboard tombs, is the best known. At Easter people go after crabs for matété, crab cooked with rice 🦀🍚.

Food, history and sport

Guadeloupe's table is Creole, French, African and Indian at once: accras of salt cod 🐟, colombo 🍛, the curry that came with workers from India after 1854, bokit 🥪, a fried bread sandwich, fish in a blaff, lobster 🦞, rice and beans 🍚🫘, fiery Creole sauce 🌶️, bananas 🍌, pineapple 🍍, mango 🥭, coconut sorbet 🥥🍨 and coffee ☕ from the hills of Basse-Terre. The same Indian heritage built the Hindu temples 🛕 that stand beside the island's Catholic churches ⛪.

⛓️‍💥 is for 27 May, a public holiday that marks the end of slavery in Guadeloupe in 1848. Slavery had been abolished once already, in 1794, and restored by Napoleon in 1802; that year Louis Delgrès and his men fought the French troops and chose to die at Matouba rather than surrender ✊. The Memorial ACTe 🏛️ in Pointe-à-Pitre, opened in 2015, tells the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Guadeloupe gives France a great many champions. Lilian Thuram ⚽, born in Pointe-à-Pitre, won the 1998 World Cup; Marie-José Pérec 🏃🥇, born in Basse-Terre, won three Olympic golds; Teddy Riner 🥋, born in Les Abymes, is one of the greatest judokas ever. The island's own football team plays in CONCACAF and reached the semi-finals of the 2007 Gold Cup. Every four years since 1978 the Route du Rhum ⛵🏁, a solo sailing race, crosses the Atlantic from Saint-Malo to Pointe-à-Pitre.

French and Creole letters and the euro sign

French is the official language, spoken by nearly all of Guadeloupe's roughly 384,000 people (the 2023 Insee count), and it needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü, plus the rare æ and ÿ; our French collection explains each one. Most people also speak Guadeloupean Creole, kréyòl gwadloupéyen, which is written much more phonetically: Gwadloup, mèsi (thank you), bèl (beautiful), lanmè (the sea). Its spelling uses é, è and ò, the open o of Kréyòl and lòt (other).

On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys and ò is AltGr+7 and then o. On Windows with any keyboard hold Alt and type 0242 for ò, 0210 for Ò, 0232 for è, 0233 for é and 0231 for ç; on a Mac press Option+` and then o for ò, Option+E then e for é and Option+C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The guillemets « » are the quotation marks, with a space inside.

Guadeloupe uses the euro €, written after the number with a space as in France: 12,50 €. On Windows it is Alt+0128 or AltGr+E. Its neighbour Martinique 🇲🇶 shares the euro, the Creole and the zouk; Saint-Martin 🇲🇫 and Saint-Barthélemy 🇧🇱 were part of Guadeloupe until 2007, when each became a French overseas collectivity of its own. See our France and Martinique collections for more.