Jamaica Emoji & Symbols

The Jamaica flag emoji 🇯🇲 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, J and M (Jamaica's ISO country code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, Jamaica's among them, became emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters JM instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was first raised on Independence Day, 6 August 1962. A gold saltire, a diagonal cross, divides it into four triangles: green at the top and bottom, black at the hoist and the fly. The official meaning today is black for the strength and creativity of the people, gold for the natural wealth and the sunlight, and green for hope and the land's agricultural riches. The first reading was blunter, "hardships there are, but the land is green and the sun shineth". It is one of very few national flags with no red, white or blue in it.

The Jamaica emoji hearts people paste for the flag are 🖤💚💛 (black, green, gold), in any order. Do not confuse them with ❤️💛💚, red, gold and green: those are the Rastafari colours, which come from the flag of Ethiopia 🇪🇹, and you see both sets on Jamaican pages, often side by side.

Jamaican symbols: the coat of arms, doctor bird, ackee and lignum vitae

The national motto is "Out of Many, One People", and it stands on the coat of arms under a male and a female Taíno figure, the island's first people, who hold a shield with a red cross and five golden pineapples 🍍. On top sits a crocodile 🐊; American crocodiles still live in the mangroves of the south coast. The name Jamaica itself is usually traced to the Taíno Xaymaca, land of wood and water.

The national bird is the doctor bird, the red-billed streamertail, a hummingbird with two long tail streamers that lives only in Jamaica. There is no hummingbird emoji, so people paste 🐦 with a 🇯🇲 beside it. The national flower is the blue blossom of the lignum vitae tree, the national tree is the blue mahoe, and the national fruit is the ackee; none has its own emoji, so 🌳 stands for the trees. 🦋 is a fair pick too: the giant swallowtail, which is the largest butterfly in the Western Hemisphere, lives in Jamaica's eastern mountains and the Cockpit Country.

🦁 belongs to Jamaica in a different way. Rastafari, the faith that grew up in Jamaica in the 1930s after Haile Selassie I was crowned emperor of Ethiopia, takes the Lion of Judah as its emblem, and the lion with ❤️💛💚 is one of the most recognisable Jamaican images in the world, on murals, record sleeves and the Bob Marley museum in Kingston.

Jamaican food emoji: jerk, ackee and saltfish, patties and curry goat

There is no emoji for ackee, so the national dish, ackee and saltfish, is usually written out with 🐟 for the salted cod; the ackee itself is a West African fruit whose yellow flesh, cooked, looks like scrambled egg, and which may only be eaten once the pod has opened on the tree by itself. 🍗🔥🌶️ is jerk: chicken or pork 🐖 rubbed with Scotch bonnet pepper, pimento (allspice) and thyme and smoked over pimento wood, or on the roadside in a jerk pan cut from an oil drum. Boston Bay in Portland is often named as its home.

🍚🫘 is rice and peas, cooked in coconut milk with red kidney beans (in Jamaica they are "peas"), the centre of Sunday dinner, and 🍛🐐 is curry goat, the party and wedding dish. A Jamaican patty, a flaky golden half-moon of pastry around spiced beef, is closest to 🥟, which also does for fried dumplings and festival. 🍲 is Saturday soup or mannish water, 🥬 callaloo, 🍌🍠 green banana, yam and the other ground provisions, and 🌽 roast corn from the roadside.

Breakfast is often porridge 🥣, cornmeal, hominy or peanut 🥜. At Easter everyone eats bun and cheese 🍞🧀, a dark spiced bun with a slice of processed cheese, and every day hard dough bread. From the sea come escovitch fish with a vinegar and pepper pickle, lobster 🦞 and the peppered shrimp 🦐 sold in bags at Middle Quarters. To drink: ☕ Blue Mountain coffee, one of the most prized coffees in the world, 🥃 rum from estates such as Appleton, 🍹 rum punch, and 🍺 a cold Red Stripe. 🫚 is Jamaican ginger, and 🌿 the thyme, pimento leaf and bush teas of every kitchen.

Independence Day, Emancipation and the holiday emoji Jamaicans send

Emancipation Day on 1 August marks the end of slavery in the British Caribbean (full freedom came on 1 August 1838), and Independence Day on 6 August marks independence from Britain in 1962; the week between them is the season people call "Emancipendence". ⛓️‍💥 is for Emancipation, 🇯🇲🎉🎆 for Independence, with flags on cars, the Grand Gala at the National Stadium and the year's Festival Song. National Heroes Day, the third Monday in October, honours the seven National Heroes, among them Nanny of the Maroons, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle and Marcus Garvey.

At Christmas the drink is sorrel 🌺, made from the red calyces of a kind of hibiscus with ginger and rum, beside a dark rum-soaked fruit cake 🍰 and the masked Jonkonnu dancers 🎭 who still parade in some towns. Christmas Eve is Grand Market, the busiest night of the year in town squares. Jamaica Carnival in the spring brings feathered costumes 🪶 and soca to Kingston, and on Sunday ⛪ the island's many churches fill; Easter means bun and cheese.

Reggae, sprinting and Cool Runnings: Jamaican music and sport emoji

Jamaica gave the world ska in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then rocksteady, then reggae at the end of the 1960s, and later dancehall; UNESCO added the reggae music of Jamaica to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2018. 🎶🔊 is the sound system, the towering speaker stacks that play street dances; 🎤 is the deejay toasting over the riddim, 🎸 and 🥁 are the band, 🎺 the horns of ska, and 🪘 the nyabinghi drums of Rastafari. 💃🕺 go under every new dancehall dance.

Bob Marley's songs are where many people first meet Jamaica, and lines from them travel with the flag: One Love ❤️💛💚, Three Little Birds' "every little thing gonna be all right" 🐦🐦🐦. His birthday, 6 February, is marked across the island, and February is Reggae Month.

🏃⚡🥇 is Jamaican sprinting. Usain Bolt, the "Lightning Bolt", still holds the 100 m and 200 m world records, 9.58 and 19.19 seconds, set in Berlin in 2009, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson-Herah won Olympic sprint golds again and again. Behind them is Champs, the boys' and girls' high-school athletics championships, which fill the National Stadium in Kingston every spring.

⚽ is the Reggae Boyz, who in 1998 became the first English-speaking Caribbean team to play at a men's World Cup, and the Reggae Girlz, who reached the Women's World Cup in 2019 and 2023. 🏏 is cricket, played for the West Indies with 🇹🇹🇧🇧🇬🇾 and the other islands, with Test matches at Sabina Park. 🛷 is the bobsleigh team that first raced at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and inspired the film Cool Runnings. And 🁡: dominoes are slammed on tables in yards and bars all over the island.

How to write Jamaican dollars and Patois

The Jamaican dollar (JMD) uses $, written J$ whenever it could be mistaken for US dollars, as in J$500 or US$20; on a keyboard $ is Shift+4. Jamaica's national language is English (see English letters and symbols), but most Jamaicans also speak Jamaican Patois, Patwa, an English-based creole with its own grammar and much West African vocabulary; it has its own page, Jamaican Creole English.

Patois needs no special letters. It is mostly written in everyday English-like spelling ("Wah gwaan", "likkle", "yaad"), and the Cassidy–JLU writing system used by linguists also sticks to plain A–Z, writing long vowels by doubling them, as in taak for talk. So everything you need for a Jamaican message is the flag, the emoji and a few words: Wah gwaan 👋, Bless up 🙏, Big up 🙌, Irie, and the island's pride, wi likkle but wi tallawah, we are small but mighty.