Indonesia Emoji & Symbols

🇮🇩 the Indonesia flag emoji shows the Sang Saka Merah Putih, two equal bands of red over white. Red is usually explained as courage and white as purity, and the colours go back to the banners of the Majapahit kingdom. The flag was first raised as the national flag on 17 August 1945 in Jakarta, when Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence; the original, hand-sewn by Sukarno's wife Fatmawati, is kept as a national heirloom.

The emoji is two regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇩, the country code ID. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the letters ID instead, while the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇮🇩. When the flag is not at hand, Indonesians write the colours: ❤️🤍 is merah putih. Do not mix it up with 🇲🇨 Monaco, which has the same two bands in a squarer shape, or with 🇵🇱 Poland, which is white over red.

Indonesia national symbols: Garuda and the five Pancasila emoji

The national emblem is Garuda Pancasila, the golden mythical bird of Hindu-Buddhist tradition; 🦅 is the emoji people use for it, and for the national football team, nicknamed Garuda. In its claws Garuda holds a ribbon with the motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, Old Javanese for "different, yet one", usually translated "Unity in Diversity". Its feathers count out the date of independence: 17 on each wing, 8 on the tail, 19 below the shield and 45 on the neck, for 17-8-1945.

The shield 🛡️ on Garuda's chest carries one symbol for each of the five principles of Pancasila, the state philosophy, and each has an emoji: ⭐ the star for belief in God, ⛓️ the chain for a just and civilised humanity, 🌳 the banyan tree (beringin) for the unity of Indonesia, 🐂 the head of a banteng, the wild ox of Java, for democracy guided by deliberation, and 🌾 rice and cotton for social justice. Pasted in a row, ⭐⛓️🌳🐂🌾 is Pancasila; schoolchildren learn the five symbols by heart.

17 Agustus, Lebaran, Nyepi: the emoji people send for Indonesian holidays

17 Agustus, Independence Day, is HUT RI, the Republic's birthday. Streets and alleys are hung with red-and-white flags and bunting for weeks, and every neighbourhood holds lomba, games: the sack race, eating a krupuk cracker hanging on a string with hands behind your back, and panjat pinang, teams climbing a greased pole for prizes tied at the top 🧗. Greetings read "Dirgahayu Republik Indonesia! 🇮🇩❤️🤍🎆" or simply "Merdeka! 🇮🇩".

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and Ramadan and Lebaran (Idul Fitri) are the biggest season of the year. 🌙🕌 open every Ramadan message, 🤲📿 stand for prayer and dzikir, 🥁 for the bedug, the big mosque drum beaten for takbiran on the eve of Lebaran, and 🧕 for the hijab. The Lebaran greeting "Selamat Hari Raya Idul Fitri, mohon maaf lahir dan batin 🙏" asks forgiveness for everything, outward and inward. Millions travel home to their villages for it, the mudik, by car, train, bus and motorbike. There is no emoji for ketupat, the rice cake woven in palm leaf, so people write the word.

Indonesia officially recognises six religions, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, and their main festivals are national holidays. In Bali, Nyepi, the Balinese Hindu new year, is a day of total silence: no lights, no traffic, no work, and even the airport closes for 24 hours. On the eve, villages parade ogoh-ogoh, giant demon effigies 👹, then burn them. 🛕 is a Balinese pura and 🌺 the flowers of the daily canang sari offerings. Imlek, Chinese New Year, has been a national holiday since 2003 and brings 🧧 angpao and 🏮 lanterns; on Waisak ☸️ monks walk to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument in the world, and lanterns are released into the night sky. Natal, Christmas, is ⛪🎄.

Indonesian food emoji, islands and animals

In 2018 the tourism ministry named five national dishes: soto, rendang, sate, nasi goreng and gado-gado. In emoji, nasi goreng is 🍚🍳 (fried rice with a fried egg on top), rendang and nasi Padang are 🍛, 🍢 is the closest thing to sate on a stick, 🍜 covers soto, bakso and mie ayam, and 🥗🥜 is gado-gado with its peanut sauce. 🌶️ is sambal, without which no Indonesian meal is complete; 🥟 is siomay, 🍗 ayam goreng and 🐟 ikan bakar. For snacks and drinks there are 🍌 for pisang goreng, 🥥 and 🥭, 🍧 for es campur, ☕ for kopi, 🍵 for sweet tea and 🫚 for ginger jamu and wedang jahe.

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands on the Ring of Fire, so 🌋 is everyday geography: Bromo's sunrise 🌄, Merapi, Rinjani and Krakatau. 🏝️🏖️🌴🌊 are the beaches, 🏄 Bali's surf, and 🤿🪸🐠🐢 the reefs of Raja Ampat and Bunaken in the Coral Triangle. 🌾 is also the green rice terraces of Bali and Java, with 🐃 the water buffalo, the kerbau, still working the paddies and honoured in Toraja.

For Indonesia's wildlife, some emoji are exact and others are stand-ins: 🦧 the orangutan (Malay orang hutan, "person of the forest") of Borneo and Sumatra, 🦎 or 🐉 for the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on Earth, 🐅 for the Sumatran tiger, 🦏 for the Javan and Sumatran rhinos, 🐘 for the Sumatran elephant, 🐒 for the macaques of Bali's monkey forests and 🦜 for the cockatoos and parrots of the eastern islands. Birds of paradise, the cendrawasih of Papua, have no species-specific emoji.

Culture, sport and city life in emoji

🎭 stands for wayang, the shadow-puppet theatre that plays epics through the night to a gamelan orchestra, and 🪘 for the kendang, the double-headed drum that leads it. 🗡️ is the keris, the wavy-bladed dagger handed down in families; wayang, keris, batik, pencak silat and gamelan are all on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, and 2 October is national Batik Day, when offices fill with batik shirts. 🪁 is the kite season in Bali, when villages fly enormous traditional kites.

In sport, 🏸 badminton is the national pride: Indonesia's first Olympic gold medals came in Barcelona in 1992, won by Susi Susanti and Alan Budikusuma, and the country has won the Thomas Cup more often than any other. ⚽ is the most followed game, and as the Dutch East Indies Indonesia was the first Asian team to play at a World Cup, in 1938. 🥋 is pencak silat, the Malay world's martial art.

🏙️ is Jakarta, 🛵 the ojek, the motorbike taxi now booked through apps, 🛺 the orange bajaj three-wheeler, and 🚄 Whoosh, the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed train that opened in 2023 as the first in Southeast Asia. Online, Indonesians laugh with wkwkwk and write the country as +62, its phone code.

Rupiah symbol Rp, optional ê and aksara Jawa copy and paste

The rupiah symbol is Rp, a capital R and small p, with no single Unicode character of its own (₨ is the rupee, a different currency). Official spelling puts it right before the number, and Indonesian uses a dot for thousands and a comma for decimals: Rp50.000 or Rp1.250.000,00.

Indonesian, the national language, is written in plain A–Z. Its official spelling guide, EYD V, permits ê on e pepet to clarify pronunciation; it gives pejabat teras [têras] as an example, while ordinary spelling remains teras. On Windows type Alt+0233 for é, Alt+0232 for è and Alt+0234 for ê; on a Mac press Option+E, Option+` or Option+I and then e; on a phone long-press e. Older spellings survive in names: Soeharto and Soekarno were written with the Dutch-era oe before the 1947 reform, and the 1972 spelling (EYD) turned tj, dj and j into c, j and y, which is why Djakarta became Jakarta.

Most Indonesians also speak a regional language. Javanese, with an estimated 96 million speakers, has its own script, aksara Jawa or hanacaraka, in Unicode since 2009 and still seen on street signs in Yogyakarta and Solo. Its 20 basic letters are recited as a poem: ha na ca ra ka, da ta sa wa la, pa dha ja ya nya, ma ga ba tha nga, "there were two messengers, they quarrelled, they were equally strong, and both fell dead", the legend of Aji Saka's servants Dora and Sembada. Each letter carries an a; vowel signs such as ꦶ (i) and ꦸ (u) change it, and the pangkon ꧀ silences it. The ornamental brackets ꧁ ꧂, the rerenggan that frame titles in Javanese manuscripts, are the same ones gamers paste around their nicknames. Sundanese and Balinese have scripts of their own too; see the Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese and Malay collections for the full alphabets.