Guinea Emoji

🇬🇳 the Guinea flag emoji shows three vertical bands, red, yellow and green, with the red next to the flagpole. Like other country flag emoji, it is encoded as the pair of regional indicator symbols, 🇬 and 🇳, for the country code GN, which supported devices combine into one flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters GN instead; recipients on Windows see GN instead of the flag too.

The flag was adopted in November 1958, a few weeks after independence. Its three colours are the Pan-African ones, first flown by Ethiopia and taken up by Ghana the year before, and they are usually explained alongside the national motto Travail, Justice, Solidarité: red for work and the blood of those who fought for freedom, yellow for justice and the sun and gold of the land, green for solidarity and the country's forests and fields. Where flags don't show, people write it with hearts, ❤️💛💚, or squares, 🟥🟨🟩, always in that order.

Guinea became independent on 2 October 1958. In the referendum of 28 September, when France offered its African colonies a place in a new French Community, Guinea was the only one to vote non, and Sékou Touré, who became its first president, had told de Gaulle that Guinea preferred "poverty in freedom to riches in slavery". 🗳️ stands for that vote, 🐘 for the elephant, syli in Susu, which was the emblem of Touré's party and is still the nickname of the national football team, and 🕊️ for the dove with an olive branch on the coat of arms.

Guinea flag vs Mali flag, and the other Guineas

The flag most often mixed up with 🇬🇳 is its neighbour's. 🇲🇱 Mali uses the same three colours in the opposite order, green next to the pole, then yellow, then red; 🇬🇳 Guinea starts with red. The two countries were briefly joined with Ghana in a union in the early 1960s, and the colours were meant as a sign of the same Pan-African hope. 🇸🇳 Senegal is green, yellow, red like Mali, with a green star in the middle, which is why people searching for a "Guinea flag with a star" are usually looking at Senegal: Guinea's flag has no star.

Three other flags share the name. 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese Guinea, has a red vertical band with a black star and yellow and green stripes; 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea, on the Gulf of Guinea further east, is green, white and red with a blue triangle; and 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea in the Pacific is red and black with a bird of paradise. Guinea itself is often called Guinea-Conakry, after its capital, to tell it apart. Each of them has its own collection, as do Mali and Senegal.

Writing Guinée: French accents and the Guinean franc

In French, one of the official languages, the country is la Guinée and its people Guinéens, so the one accent nearly everyone needs is é. CLDR estimates about 3.8 million French speakers, while Guinea's 2026 preliminary census puts its population at about 17.5 million; French is the language of school, government, newspapers and much texting, mixed freely with Pular, Maninka and Susu. On a US keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt+0233 é, Alt+0201 É, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0224 à, Alt+0231 ç, Alt+0234 ê, Alt+0244 ô, Alt+0146 ’, Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 ». On a Mac, Option+E then e gives é, Option+` then e gives è, Option+C gives ç, Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ give « and ». On a phone, long-press the plain letter. The full alphabet is in the French collection.

Guinea pays in the Guinean franc (code GNF). It has no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written with the letters after the number, 10 000 FG or 10 000 GNF, and banknotes come in large denominations, so a market price often runs to five figures. In the 1970s and early 1980s the country used a currency named the syli, like the elephant, before the franc came back in 1986. For money talk people use 💰, 💵 and 🪙.

Pular, Maninka and Susu letters, and the N’Ko and Adlam scripts

Guinea's three great languages are Pular, the Fula of the Fouta Djallon highlands, Maninka (Malinké), a Manding language of Upper Guinea around Kankan, close to Bambara and Dioula, and Susu of the coast and Conakry, which is the everyday language of the capital's streets. CLDR estimates about 3.6 million Fula speakers, 3.2 million Mandingo and 1.5 million Susu in Guinea; in the forest region of the south-east people speak Kpelle (Guerzé), Kissi, Toma and others.

Written in Latin letters, these languages need more than A–Z. Pular has the "hooked" consonants Ɓ ɓ and Ɗ ɗ, said with a little gulp of air inwards, and Ƴ ƴ, the same kind of y; Ŋ ŋ is the ng of "sing", and the ny sound of Spanish ñ is written ñ or ɲ depending on the spelling in use. Maninka and Susu add the open vowels Ɛ ɛ, as in English "bed", and Ɔ ɔ, as in British "law", with Ɲ ɲ and Ŋ ŋ. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 0253 for ɓ, 0181 for Ɓ, 0257 for ɗ, 018A for Ɗ, 01B4 for ƴ, 01B3 for Ƴ, 014B for ŋ, 0272 for ɲ, 025B for ɛ and 0254 for ɔ; ñ is Alt+0241 on the number pad. Or copy them from this page.

Two whole alphabets were invented by Guineans. N’Ko, ߒߞߏ, was created in 1949 by Solomana Kanté, born near Kankan, for the Manding languages; its name means "I say" in all of them, it is written right to left, and it is taught and printed widely in Upper Guinea, with 14 April kept as N’Ko day. Adlam, 𞤀𞤣𞤤𞤢𞤥, was created for Pular in 1989 in Nzérékoré by two teenage brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry; it is also written right to left, has capital and small letters, and entered Unicode in 2016. Both have free keyboards such as Keyman's. The Fula, Mandingo, N’Ko, Susu and Kpelle collections have the full alphabets.

Guinean food emoji: rice and sauce, fonio, fruit and ataya

🍚 is the Guinean meal. Rice is eaten every day, and "riz sauce" means rice with one of the great sauces: sauce feuille, made from pounded cassava or sweet potato leaves 🥬, sauce d'arachide, a rich groundnut stew 🥜, or okra and palm oil sauces, cooked in a big pot 🍲 and served from a shared bowl 🥘. On the coast it comes with fish 🐟, often grilled whole, and tomato 🍅, onion 🧅 and chili 🌶️ go into almost everything.

🌾 stands for fonio, the tiny ancient grain of the Fouta Djallon, of which Guinea grows more than any other country. 🥛🐄 belong to the Fula herders of the highlands: kosam is milk in Pular, and the hardy N'Dama cattle are a breed from the Fouta Djallon. Guinea is famous in the region for its fruit, mangoes 🥭 in the dry season, pineapples 🍍 and bananas 🍌, and the forest region grows coffee ☕ and the kola nuts 🌰 that are still offered as a sign of respect, at weddings and when asking a favour.

To drink there is ataya 🫖🍵, strong sweet green tea brewed in a small pot and poured from a height in three rounds, ginger juice 🫚 and bissap from hibiscus flowers 🌺.

Djembe, kora, the Syli National and Guinean holidays

Guinea is one of the homes of West African music. 🪘 is the long drum emoji, used here as a stand-in for the djembe, the goblet drum of the Malinké that Guinean masters such as Mamady Keïta took around the world, played with 🥁 the dunun bass drums; 🪕 is the nearest emoji to the kora, the 21-string harp of the griots, which Mory Kanté electrified into the Europe-wide hit "Yé ké yé ké" in the late 1980s. Les Ballets Africains became the national dance company after independence, and Bembeya Jazz National the great band of the 1960s and 70s: 🎶🎤💃🕺. 🎭 is the nearest emoji to the masks of the Baga of the coast, whose tall D'mba headdress is one of Africa's best-known carvings. 🦁 is Sundiata Keita, the "lion" who founded the Mali Empire in the 13th century on the upper Niger, in lands that are now part of Guinea and Mali; his epic is still sung by griots, and the balafon of Niagassola, the Sosso Bala, is on UNESCO's heritage list.

⚽🐘🇬🇳 cheers the Syli National, the elephants. Guinea reached the final round of the 1976 Africa Cup of Nations and finished second, and the Conakry club Hafia FC was champion of Africa three times in the 1970s; Horoya AC is the great club of today. 🏆 and 🏟️ come out for every qualifier at the stadium in Conakry.

Independence Day on 2 October is 🇬🇳🎉🎆. Most Guineans are Muslim, so the great feasts are 🌙 Ramadan and its end, and 🐏🕌 Tabaski (Eid al-Adha), when families share a ram; 📿 and 🤲 go with prayers and good wishes. Christians, many of them in the forest region, celebrate Christmas 🎄⛪, and 🙏 ends most messages of thanks.

🏙️🌊 is Conakry, built along a narrow peninsula into the Atlantic, with the 🏝️🏖️ Îles de Loos a short boat ride offshore, fishing pirogues 🛶 on the beaches and taxis 🚕 and motorbike taxis 🏍️ in the streets. Guinea is called the water tower of West Africa: the Niger, Senegal and Gambia rivers all rise in its highlands ⛰️🏞️💧, and Conakry is one of the rainiest capitals in the world 🌧️. Under the ground ⛏️🪨, Guinea has the largest bauxite reserves on Earth, the ore of aluminium. In the far south-east Mount Nimba, the highest peak, is a UNESCO site of forest 🌳, and the chimpanzees 🐒 of nearby Bossou crack nuts with stone hammers.