Kazakhstan Emoji & Symbols

The Kazakhstan flag emoji 🇰🇿 is sky blue with a golden sun of 32 rays, a soaring steppe eagle beneath it and a golden band of national ornament along the hoist. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇰 and 🇿, for the country code KZ; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the letters KZ. Where flags do not display, people write the colours as 🟦🟨 or 💙💛, and ☀️🦅 together is the quickest way to draw the flag's centre.

The flag was adopted on 4 June 1992, half a year after independence, to a design by the artist Shaken Niyazbekov, and 4 June is celebrated as the Day of State Symbols. The blue is usually read as the open sky and the peace and unity of the country's many peoples, the sun as life and abundance, and the eagle as freedom and the high aims of the state. The ornament at the hoist is qoshqar müiz, the ram's horn pattern that also runs across Kazakh felt rugs and embroidery, which is why 🐏 belongs among the national symbols.

The state emblem is round and blue like the sky seen through the top of a yurt: in the middle is the shanyrak, the wooden crown ring of the yurt 🛖, with sun rays around it and two golden winged horses with horns, the tulpars of Turkic legend, on either side. 🦄 is the nearest emoji to a tulpar, and the shanyrak itself is a symbol of home and family that Kazakhs pass from parents to the youngest son.

The tenge sign ₸ and the Kazakh letters Ә Ғ Қ Ң Ө Ұ Ү Һ І

The tenge symbol is ₸ (U+20B8), the currency code is KZT, and one tenge is 100 tiyn. The tenge replaced the Soviet rouble on 15 November 1993, a day now marked as National Currency Day; the sign, a T under a bar, was chosen in a public competition in 2007 and entered Unicode in 2010. In Kazakhstan it is written after the amount with a space: 500 ₸. To type it, copy it from the grid, use the HTML code ₸, or in Word type 20b8 and press Alt+X.

Kazakh is written in a Cyrillic alphabet of 42 letters, nine of them distinctively Kazakh. Ә ә is the open front vowel of сәлем (hello), Ғ ғ a throaty gh as in ғалым (scientist), Қ қ a deep k made at the back of the throat, as in Қазақстан itself, Ң ң the ng sound of таң (dawn), Ө ө and Ү ү the rounded front vowels of өнер (art) and үй (home), Ұ ұ a short back u as in ұлт (nation), Һ һ an h used mainly in loanwords, and І і a short front i as in іні (younger brother). Watch the look-alikes: Kazakh І is Cyrillic U+0406, not the Latin I, and Ү and Һ are not Latin Y and h, so a name typed with the wrong one will not match in a search.

To type them, add the Kazakh keyboard: in Windows the Kazakh layout puts the nine letters on the number row, Macs have a Kazakh input source, and Gboard and the iPhone offer Kazakh keyboards with all of them. In HTML, Ә is Ә and і is і; the full alphabet with every code is in the Kazakh collection, and the Russian letters in the Russian one. Kazakh and Russian both quote with «guillemets» and number with №. In 2017 Kazakhstan set a goal of moving Kazakh to the Latin alphabet; the draft alphabet and spelling rules remain under review, and the phased transition will proceed after they are approved, so Cyrillic remains the main script in use.

Nauryz emoji and the holidays of Kazakhstan 🌷

Nauryz, the spring New Year at the equinox, is the warmest holiday of the year, with days off around 21–23 March. Towns put up white yurts in their squares, families visit one another, and everyone tastes nauryz kozhe 🥣, a soup made of seven ingredients, among them water, meat, salt, milk and grain. 🌷 and 🌱 stand for the spring itself: wild tulips cover the steppe and the foothills in April, and Central Asia is where the tulip comes from. The greeting is Наурыз құтты болсын! (Nauryz qutty bolsyn), happy Nauryz.

Independence Day is 16 December: Kazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence, in 1991. 25 October is Republic Day, 6 July is Capital Day in Astana, and 1 May is the Day of Unity of the People of Kazakhstan, a nod to the many peoples who live here. 🇰🇿 with 🎆 or ❤️ is the usual message on all of them.

New Year's Eve 🎄❄️ is the biggest night of winter, with a decorated tree, fireworks 🎆 and a long dastarkhan of food; the wish is Жаңа жылыңыз құтты болсын! Most Kazakhs are Muslim, and 🌙 and 🕌 go out at Ramadan and at Qurban ait, the feast of sacrifice; many Russian and Ukrainian families are Orthodox, and ⛪ appears at Easter and on Orthodox Christmas, 7 January.

Kazakh food emoji: beshbarmak 🍖, kumys 🥛 and tea 🫖

🍖 is beshbarmak, the national dish: boiled horse meat or mutton laid over wide sheets of noodle dough and covered with onion in broth. The name means "five fingers", because it was traditionally eaten by hand, and the head of the sheep is offered to the most honoured guest. 🥩 also stands for kazy, the horse-meat sausage of every festive table, 🥟 for manty, large steamed dumplings, 🍚 for palau, the Central Asian plov, and 🍲 for sorpa, the broth served after the meat.

🥛 means one of two drinks. Kumys is mare's milk fermented in a leather bag until it fizzes slightly, the summer drink of the steppe; shubat is fermented camel's milk 🐫, thicker and richer, from the south and west. 🧀 is kurt, small hard balls of dried salty curd that last for months and travel well. 🫓 and 🍞 stand for the round flatbread from the tandyr and for baursak, the puffy pieces of fried dough heaped on every dastarkhan.

Then comes tea, and a lot of it. Kazakhs drink black tea with milk from wide bowls called kese; the host pours only a little at a time, so the tea stays hot and the conversation keeps going. 🫖🍵 is the nearest emoji, with 🍯 for the honey and jam set out beside it. 🍎 belongs to Almaty, whose old name Alma-Ata is often translated as "father of apples": the wild apples of the Tian Shan are the ancestor of the apples people eat everywhere. 🍈🍉 are the sweet melons and watermelons of the south.

Kazakhstan emoji for places: Astana, Almaty, Baikonur and the steppe

Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world, and most of it is steppe 🌾 and semi-desert 🏜️, where herds of 🐎 horses, 🐑 sheep and two-humped 🐫 camels still graze and where the north grows the wheat the country exports. 🛖 is the nearest emoji to the kiiz üi, the felt yurt, and 🧶 stands for the felt itself, pressed from sheep's wool into rugs with the ram's horn pattern. 🐺 is the steppe wolf of the old legends.

🏙️ is Astana, the capital since 1997, built up on the open steppe in the north; its landmark is Baiterek, a white tower holding a golden ball, after the legend of the tree of life 🌳 where the magic bird Samruk laid its golden egg. The ball sits 97 metres up, for the year the capital moved. Astana is often called one of the coldest capitals in the world, so ❄️ is never far away. 🏔️ is Almaty, the biggest city, under the snowy peaks of the Tian Shan, with the Medeu skating rink and the Shymbulak ski slopes just above town; 🐆 stands for the snow leopard, which appears on Almaty's coat of arms. 🏞️ is Charyn Canyon and the Kolsai lakes, 🌊 the Caspian coast at Aktau.

🕌 is the turquoise-domed Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan, built under Timur and listed by UNESCO, and ⛪ the wooden Ascension Cathedral in Almaty's Panfilov Park. 🚀 is Baikonur, the cosmodrome in the steppe from which Sputnik flew in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and from which crews still leave for the space station 🧑‍🚀🛰️. 🛢️ is the oil of the Caspian fields, Tengiz and Kashagan, and ⛏️ the mines: Kazakhstan is the world's largest producer of uranium.

Horses, eagles, music and sport: 🐎 🦅 🪕 🥊

The horse is at the heart of Kazakh life, and 🏇 covers traditional horseback games at festivals: baiga, a long-distance race, kokpar, in which riders fight over a goat carcass, and kyz kuu, "catch the girl", where a young man chases a girl on horseback and she whips him all the way back if he fails. 🏹 is horseback archery. 🦅 is also the berkutchi, the hunter who rides with a golden eagle on his arm; Kazakh eagle hunters still ride out each winter in Bayan-Ölgii, in western Mongolia.

🪕 stands in for the dombra, the two-stringed long-necked lute that is found in many homes, with its own National Dombra Day on the first Sunday of July; 🎻 is the kobyz, the ancient bowed instrument of the shamans, and 🎶 the küi, the instrumental pieces that tell a story without words. 🎤 belongs to Dimash Kudaibergen, the singer known around the world for his range.

In sport, 🥊 is boxing, with Gennady "GGG" Golovkin and a long line of Olympic champions; 🤼 is kazaksha kures, belt wrestling, and 🏋️ weightlifting. 🚴 is cycling, from Alexander Vinokourov's Olympic gold in London in 2012 to the Astana team; 🎾 is Elena Rybakina, who won Wimbledon for Kazakhstan in 2022; ⛸️ is Denis Ten, Olympic bronze in figure skating in 2014, and 🏒 the Barys hockey club of Astana. ⚽ with 🇰🇿 is for the national team, and the cheer is Алға, Қазақстан! (Forward, Kazakhstan!).