Kiribati Emoji & Symbols

The Kiribati flag emoji 🇰🇮 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, K and I (the country's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as a flag; most country flags, this one included, became emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters KI instead, but the text is the same and shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was raised at independence on 12 July 1979 and comes from the coat of arms designed for the Gilbert Islands colony in the 1930s by the administrator Arthur Grimble. The top half is red, with a golden frigatebird flying over a golden rising sun; the sun has 17 rays, for the 16 Gilbert Islands and Banaba. The bottom half is blue with three white wavy bands: the Pacific Ocean and the country's three island groups, the Gilbert, Phoenix and Line Islands. The frigatebird stands for command of the sea and for freedom. Unicode has no frigatebird, so people use 🐦, 🪶 or 🪽 for it, 🌅 for the sun and 🌊 for the waves, and paste the colours as ❤️💛💙🤍. The motto under the arms is Te Mauri, Te Raoi ao Te Tabomoa, "Health, Peace and Prosperity".

Kiribati symbols: 32 atolls and one raised island across the equator

Kiribati (said KEE-ree-bas: in the Gilbertese spelling ti stands for the s sound, so the name is the local form of "Gilberts") is 32 low coral atolls and one raised coral island, Banaba, spread across about 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean. It lies on both sides of the equator and, east and west, on both sides of the 180th meridian, which makes it the only country in all four hemispheres; 🌏🗺️🧭 are the emoji for that. CLDR estimates put the population at around 117,000, about half of them on South Tarawa, the capital, a thin strip of land between a lagoon and the open sea.

🏝️🌴🥥 are the everyday picture of an atoll: a ring of sand and coconut palms around a turquoise lagoon, most of it only a couple of metres above high tide. The coconut is the tree of life here, giving food, drink, oil, rope, thatch and copra, the dried coconut meat that has long been one of the country's few exports. In the east, Kiritimati (Christmas Island; Kiritimati is the Gilbertese spelling of "Christmas") is one of the largest coral atolls in the world by land area. In the middle, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2010, is one of the largest marine protected areas on Earth, full of reef fish 🐠, sharks 🦈, turtles 🐢 and dolphins 🐬.

First to see the new day: the date line and Kiribati New Year

Until 1994 the International Date Line ran straight through Kiribati, so its eastern islands were nearly a day behind Tarawa and the government had only four shared working days a week. On 1 January 1995 the country moved the line east around its territory, bringing the whole nation to the same side of the date line. The Line Islands, Kiritimati among them, now keep UTC+14, the earliest time zone on Earth, so they are the first inhabited place to see each new day and to greet the New Year. 🕛🎆🇰🇮 and 🌐🕛 are the combos for it, and "Kiribati new year" is a popular search around December as people watch the countdown begin.

Uninhabited Caroline Island, at the very front of the time zones, was renamed Millennium Island for the arrival of the year 2000. The country's Phoenix Islands keep UTC+13 and the Gilberts, with Tarawa, UTC+12.

Canoes, the maneaba and Kiribati dance

Life in Kiribati faces the sea. ⛵🛶 is the outrigger sailing canoe (te wa), still built and raced on the lagoons; 🎣🐟 is the daily catch of tuna, reef fish and the famous bonefish of Kiritimati's flats, which draw fly-fishers from around the world. 🛳️ and ✈️ are how people travel between atolls hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart.

Villages typically have their own maneaba 🛖, a large open-sided meeting house with a high thatched roof, where the community talks, feasts and dances; the national parliament is called the Maneaba ni Maungatabu. Kiribati dance 💃🕺 is famous for its sharp head and hand movements and outstretched arms that imitate the frigatebird, danced to a seated choir that sings and claps 👏🎶. Dancers wear woven skirts and garlands of fresh flowers 🌺🌼. Most I-Kiribati are Christian, Catholic or Protestant, so ⛪✝️🙏 belong to Sunday as much as the maneaba does.

Kiribati food, sport and Independence Day emoji

Atoll soil is poor, so the diet is built on fish 🐟, coconut 🥥, breadfruit, pandanus fruit and babai, giant swamp taro grown for years in pits dug down to the fresh groundwater and saved for feasts; with no taro or breadfruit emoji, 🍠 stands in. Imported rice 🍚 and tinned fish and meat 🥫 are everyday staples now, 🐖 is the pig of a big celebration, and 🦀 is the coconut crab. Te karewe is the sweet sap tapped from a coconut palm's flower stalk, and boiled down it becomes kamaimai syrup.

Football ⚽ and volleyball 🏐 are the games of every island. 🏋️🏅 is David Katoatau, the weightlifter who won Kiribati's first Commonwealth Games gold in Glasgow in 2014 and whose dancing on the Olympic platform in Rio in 2016 was meant to make the world look at what rising seas mean for his country. Independence Day, 12 July, is the biggest celebration of the year, with parades, canoe races, sports and dancing in the maneabas, and feeds fill with 🇰🇮🎉, ❤️💛💙🤍 and 🛶🏆.

Gilbertese letters, the Kiribati currency symbol $ and the climate emoji

The national language is Gilbertese (te taetae ni Kiribati), with English as an official language beside it. Its alphabet needs no special characters: 13 letters, a b e i k m n ng o r t u w, with ng counted as one letter, w written after b and m in sounds like bw and mw (Ko rabwa, "thank you"), and long vowels and consonants written double (aa, ee, nn and ngg). Everything on a plain A–Z keyboard is enough; for English and its typography see the English collection.

The currency is the Australian dollar, so the Kiribati currency symbol is the ordinary dollar sign $ with ¢ for cents, and 💵🪙 as emoji; Kiribati also mints its own coins, worth the same as Australian ones. Because most land is only a couple of metres above the sea, Kiribati is one of the countries most threatened by sea-level rise, and 🌊📈, 🌡️ and 💧 (fresh water is scarce on an atoll) are how people write about it. In 2014 the government bought land on Vanua Levu in Fiji 🇫🇯 to secure food for the future.