Guyana Emoji & Symbols

The Guyana flag emoji 🇬🇾 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, G and Y (the country's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags, this one included, became emoji in 2015. Where flags are not supported (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters GY instead, but the text is the same and it shows as a flag on the reader's phone. Search "Guyana" in your phone's emoji keyboard to find it. Do not mix it up with 🇬🇫, which is French Guiana, a French region further east beyond Suriname.

The flag is called the Golden Arrowhead. It was designed by the American flag scholar Whitney Smith, finished by Britain's College of Arms, and first raised at independence on 26 May 1966. On a green field, a golden arrowhead with a white border points from the hoist to the fly, and inside it sits a red triangle with a black border. Officially green stands for the farmland and forests, white for the rivers and water, gold for the mineral wealth, black for the endurance of the people and red for their zeal in building the nation. The usual emoji spelling of the colours is 💚🤍💛🖤❤️, and 🏹 is the nearest thing to the arrowhead.

Guyana national symbols as emoji

The national animal is the jaguar. Unicode has no jaguar, so Guyanese use 🐆 (officially a leopard), and the national football team is nicknamed the Golden Jaguars. The national flower is the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, whose round floating leaves can grow wider than a person is tall; 🪷 is the closest emoji. The national bird is the hoatzin, which Guyanese call the Canje pheasant after the Canje River in Berbice: a crested, reddish-brown bird of the riverbanks with no emoji of its own, so 🐦 stands in.

The coat of arms gathers more of them: two jaguars holding a pickaxe ⛏️, sugar cane and rice 🌾, a shield with the water lily and the Canje pheasant, diamonds 💎 and an Amerindian headdress 🪶. Under it runs the national motto, One People, One Nation, One Destiny.

Land of many waters: Kaieteur Falls, rainforest and Georgetown

The name Guyana is usually explained as an Amerindian word for "land of many waters", and the big three rivers, the Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice, also name the three counties. Most people live on the narrow coast; inland the country is mostly rainforest 🌳, with the Rupununi savannas in the south-west. On the Potaro River, Kaieteur Falls drops about 226 metres (741 feet) in a single plunge, more than four times the height of Niagara; with no waterfall emoji, people post it as 🏞️💧🌊. Speedboats 🚤 and ferries ⛴️ carry people across the wide river mouths, and dugout canoes 🛶 are still used in Amerindian villages.

The forest and savanna are why wildlife emoji fill Guyana travel posts: 🐆 jaguars, 🐊 black caiman, 🦦 giant river otters, 🦥 sloths, 🐒 howler and spider monkeys, 🦜 macaws, 🦅 the harpy eagle, 🐍 anacondas, 🦋 blue morpho butterflies and 🐟 the arapaima, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world. Sea turtles 🐢, leatherbacks among them, nest at Shell Beach on the north-west coast. The tiny golden frog 🐸 of Kaieteur lives in the giant bromeliads around the falls.

The capital, Georgetown, lies below the level of high tide behind a long sea wall, with Dutch-built canals and sluices draining its streets; the seawall is where people meet on a Sunday evening. Its best-known buildings are St. George's Cathedral ⛪, one of the tallest wooden churches in the world, and Stabroek Market with its iron clock tower 🕰️. Georgetown is also the seat of the CARICOM secretariat, the Caribbean Community, which is why Guyana counts as Caribbean although it sits on the South American mainland. 🛖 is the usual emoji for an Amerindian benab, a thatched open-sided house.

Six peoples, one pot: Guyanese food emoji

Guyana calls itself the land of six peoples: Indigenous (Amerindian), African, East Indian, Portuguese, Chinese and European, and every one of them is on the plate. Pepperpot 🍲, a dark, slow-cooked meat stew flavoured with cassareep, a syrup boiled down from cassava 🫜, comes from the Amerindian kitchen and is the Christmas morning dish, eaten with bread. Cook-up rice 🍚🫘🥥, rice and peas cooked down in coconut milk with meat, is the classic Saturday and New Year's Day pot, and metemgee is a one-pot of ground provisions, plantain 🍌 and coconut milk.

From India came curry and roti 🍛🫓: chicken curry 🍗 with roti or dhal puri is everyday food, and the small round wiri wiri pepper 🌶️ is Guyana's own hot pepper. Chinese-Guyanese cooks gave the country its much-loved chow mein 🍜, and the Portuguese gave garlic pork 🧄🐖, another Christmas favourite. Mangoes 🥭 are the fruit of the season. To drink there is Demerara rum 🥃 (the same region names demerara sugar), Banks beer 🍺, and at Christmas homemade sorrel and ginger beer 🫚.

Mashramani, Phagwah, Diwali, Easter kites and cricket

Mashramani, or Mash, is held on 23 February, Republic Day, the day Guyana became a republic in 1970. The word comes from an Amerindian language and is usually translated as a celebration after a job well done. It is a day of costume bands, floats, steel pans and calypso contests through Georgetown, sent as 🎭💃🕺🥁🎤🎶🎉. Independence Day, 26 May, brings 🇬🇾🎆.

The country keeps the holidays of all its faiths ✝️🕉️☪️. Phagwah (Holi) in spring is a day of coloured powder and water 🎨, Diwali fills homes with diyas 🪔✨ and Georgetown with an illuminated motorcade, and Eid 🌙🕌 is a public holiday too. At Easter the whole coast flies homemade kites 🪁, above all on Easter Monday along the Georgetown seawall. Emancipation Day on 1 August remembers the end of slavery ⛓️‍💥✊, and Arrival Day on 5 May the first ships 🚢 that brought indentured workers from India in 1838. At Christmas 🎄 there is pepperpot, black cake and masquerade bands with drums and flutes.

Cricket 🏏 is the passion. Guyana plays Test cricket as part of the West Indies, which has no flag emoji, and it has given the team Clive Lloyd, captain when the West Indies won the first two World Cups in 1975 and 1979 🏆, as well as Lance Gibbs, Rohan Kanhai and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Big matches are played at Providence Stadium 🏟️. Football ⚽ belongs to the Golden Jaguars, and motor racing 🏎️ fans head to the South Dakota Circuit near the airport.

Guyana currency symbol: the Guyanese dollar, gold and oil

Guyana pays in the Guyanese dollar (code GYD). The symbol G$ may be used; prices are also written with $ or GY$ when US dollars might be meant, as in G$2,000. On a US keyboard, $ is Shift + 4, and 💵🪙 are the emoji for cash. Gold and diamonds ⛏️💎 have been mined in the interior for generations, and since oil was found offshore in 2015 and pumped from 2019, 🛢️ has joined them in news about the economy.

English is the official language, the only one in South America, and day to day most people speak Guyanese Creole, often called Creolese. Both are written in plain A–Z, so there are no special letters to copy for this country (see our English collection). CLDR estimates put the population at about 800,000. For the neighbours, see our Suriname 🇸🇷, Brazil 🇧🇷 and Venezuela 🇻🇪 collections; the colonial past adds 🇳🇱 (the Dutch held the coast first) and 🇬🇧 (British Guiana until 1966), India 🇮🇳 is the homeland of the largest community, and the big diaspora in New York and Toronto adds 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦.