Guinea-Bissau Emoji & Symbols

The Guinea-Bissau flag emoji 🇬🇼 shows a vertical red band at the hoist with a black five-pointed star, next to two horizontal stripes, yellow over green. It was adopted when the country declared independence in 1973 and comes from the flag of the PAIGC, the movement that fought for independence from Portugal. Red is usually read as the blood shed in that struggle, yellow as the sun and the land's wealth, green as hope and the forests and fields, and the black star as African unity.

Behind the scenes 🇬🇼 is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇬 and 🇼, spelling the country code GW. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters GW instead, though the person you send it to on a phone still sees the flag.

If a ready-made star is all you need, the text symbol ★ (black star) pastes anywhere as plain text, and ⭐ is its emoji cousin. For the colours without the flag, people write 🟥🟨🟩 or ❤️💛💚, sometimes with 🖤 for the star.

Guinea-Bissau flag similar to Ghana, Guinea and Cape Verde

Red, yellow and green are the Pan-African colours, so several West African flags look alike in a small emoji. Ghana's 🇬🇭 has the same colours and a black star too, but in three horizontal stripes with the star in the middle. Neighbouring Guinea's 🇬🇳 is three vertical bands, red, yellow and green, with no star. Equatorial Guinea 🇬🇶 shares the word Guinea in its name but has a completely different flag of green, white and red with a blue triangle.

The closest relative is historical: Cape Verde 🇨🇻 and Guinea-Bissau won independence through the same movement, and Cape Verde's first flag, used until 1992, was almost the same as Guinea-Bissau's. Today's Cape Verde flag is blue with a ring of yellow stars.

Bijagós islands, wildlife and food emoji

Off the coast lies the Bijagós Archipelago, dozens of islands of mangroves, sandbanks and palm forest, a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1996. 🏝️, 🌊 and 🏖️ stand for it in travel posts. Its most famous residents are the hippos of Orango, which swim between islands in salt water, so 🦛 is a genuinely Bissau-Guinean emoji. Green sea turtles 🐢 nest in large numbers on Poilão island, and dolphins 🐬 are common in the channels. On the mainland, Cantanhez forest in the south is home to chimpanzees, so 🐒 and 🌳 fit there, alongside parrots 🦜.

Rice is the staple: 🌾 for the paddies, many of them won from the mangroves, and 🍚 on the plate. Groundnuts, mancarra, go into the peanut stew caldo de mancarra, so 🥜 and 🍲 belong together. From the sea and the estuaries come 🐟, 🦐 and grilled oysters 🦪, and the fruit bowl is 🥭 and 🥥.

Cashew nuts are by far Guinea-Bissau's biggest export and the harvest season shapes the whole year, but there is no cashew emoji. People usually make do with 🥜 or 🌰, or simply write caju, the Portuguese word for cashew.

Independence Day, carnival and football

Guinea-Bissau declared independence on 24 September 1973, and Portugal recognised it in September 1974, so 24 September is Independence Day: 🇬🇼🎆🎉 or ✊🇬🇼 for the liberation struggle. On 20 January the country remembers Amílcar Cabral, a co-founder of the PAIGC, who was assassinated in 1973 just months before independence.

Bissau's carnival, in the weeks before Lent, is known for its handmade masks, dancers and drums, which is where 🎭, 💃 and 🥁 come in. The country's own popular music is gumbé, made famous abroad by the band Super Mama Djombo; 🎶🪘 fits it well.

Football ⚽ is the national passion. The team, nicknamed the Djurtus, reached the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time in 2017 and has qualified several times since, so 🇬🇼⚽🔥 shows up in every tournament.

Guinea-Bissau language, letters and currency symbol

Portuguese is the official language, used in government, schools and the press; the country's own name in Portuguese is Guiné-Bissau, with an acute é. The letters you need beyond A–Z are á à â ã é ê í ó ô õ ú ç and their capitals. Everyday life, though, runs mostly in Guinea-Bissau Creole, Kriol, a Portuguese-based language that is the common tongue between speakers of Balanta, Fula, Mandinka, Manjak, Papel and the country's many other languages. French is taught in schools too, and CLDR estimates around 320,000 speakers; the Portuguese and French collections cover both alphabets in full.

To type the accents on Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0233 é, 0227 ã, 0245 õ, 0231 ç, 0234 ê. On a Mac, Option + E then a letter gives an acute (é), Option + N then a or o gives ã or õ, Option + I then a letter gives a circumflex (ê) and Option + C gives ç. On a phone, press and hold the plain letter.

The currency is the West African CFA franc, shared with seven other countries of the West African monetary union since Guinea-Bissau joined it in 1997, when it replaced the Guinea-Bissau peso. It has no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written F CFA or FCFA, or with the code XOF, as in 5 000 F CFA.