Kyrgyzstan Emoji & Symbols

The Kyrgyzstan flag emoji 🇰🇬 is a red flag with a golden sun in the middle, and inside the sun a ring crossed by two sets of three lines: the tunduk, the wooden crown at the top of a yurt through which smoke leaves and light comes in. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇰 and 🇬, for the country code KG; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the letters KG. Where flags do not display, 🟥☀️🟥 or 🟥🟡🟥 do the job, and ☼ is a plain-text sun that works in most fonts.

The sun has forty rays, usually explained as the forty tribes that the hero Manas united into one people; a popular etymology even reads the name Kyrgyz as kyrk, forty. The red is said to come from Manas's banner and stands for courage, and the tunduk stands for home, family and the unity of the people under one roof. The flag was adopted on 3 March 1992 and redrawn in December 2023, when the rays, which used to be wavy, were made straight.

🛖 is the nearest emoji to the yurt, the boz üy (grey house) of felt over a folding wooden frame. Yurts are still put up on summer pastures and for weddings, funerals and holidays, and the skills of making them are on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage. 🏕️ and ⛺ work for the yurt camps where travellers stay by the mountain lakes.

Horses, eagles and nomad life: 🐎 🦅 🐑

🐎 is central to Kyrgyz culture. A proverb calls the horse a man's wings (Ат – эр канаты), children in herding families often learn to ride very young, and every summer families move their herds up to the jailoo, the high pastures, where mare's milk is fermented into kymyz (🥛), the sour, lightly fizzy national drink. 🐑 🐏 🐐 are the flocks that cover the hills, and 🐫 the Bactrian camel of the Silk Road caravans that once crossed these passes.

🦅 belongs to the berkutchi, hunters who train golden eagles to take foxes and hares in winter; with 🏹 for archery from the saddle, it is part of salbuurun, the traditional hunt. 🏇 is the horse games: kok-boru, two teams of riders fighting for a goat carcass and throwing it into the rival's goal, inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List in 2017.

🧶 and 🧵 stand for felt and embroidery. The shyrdak, a felt carpet sewn from bold mirrored patterns in two colours, and the pressed felt ala-kiyiz are on UNESCO's list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. The white felt hat, the kalpak, has no emoji of its own, but it has a holiday: Kalpak Day on 5 March.

Kyrgyz food emoji: beshbarmak 🍖, plov 🍚 and kymyz 🥛

🍖 is beshbarmak, "five fingers": boiled mutton or horse meat cut fine over flat noodles and eaten by hand, the dish of every feast; the most honoured guest is served the sheep's head. 🍚 is plov, rice cooked with carrots and meat in a big kazan, a pride of the south around Osh. 🍜 is lagman, hand-pulled noodles with meat and vegetables, and in Karakol ashlyan-fu, the cold spicy noodle soup of the Dungan community. 🥟 is manty, large steamed dumplings, and 🍲 is any kazan stew, or the sümölök of wheat sprouts stirred all night for Nooruz.

🫓 is the round nan baked on the wall of a tandyr oven, which should never be laid upside down or thrown away, and 🍞 covers boorsok, pieces of fried dough heaped on the dastorkon, the festive tablecloth. 🫖 🍵 are tea, poured often and in small amounts so that it stays hot. 🍎 and 🌰 point to the fruit and nut forests of the south: Arslanbob is often called the largest natural walnut forest in the world, and wild apple trees grow on the Tian Shan slopes. 🍈 🍉 are the melons of the Osh and Jalal-Abad bazaars, and 🍯 the pale mountain honey sold along the roads.

Kyrgyzstan emoji for places: the Tian Shan, Issyk-Kul and Osh

🏔️ and ⛰️ are not decoration here: most of Kyrgyzstan is mountains, the Tian Shan in the north and east and the Pamir-Alay in the south. The highest point is Jengish Chokusu (Peak Pobeda), 7,439 m, on the border with China, and climbers come for Lenin Peak, 7,134 m, on the border with Tajikistan (🧗). 🌄 and 🏞️ fit the gorge of Ala-Archa near Bishkek, the red cliffs of Jeti-Oguz and the lake of Song-Kul at about 3,000 m, where yurt camps stand in summer. 🥾 is trekking and 🎿 skiing above Karakol.

🌊 and 🏖️ are Issyk-Kul (Ысык-Көл, "warm lake"), one of the largest mountain lakes in the world. It is slightly salty and does not freeze in winter, and in summer its northern shore around Cholpon-Ata fills with beach holidays. ♨️ is the hot springs of Altyn-Arashan and Jeti-Oguz in the mountains above it. 🦌 recalls the legend of the Horned Mother Deer who led the Kyrgyz to the lake, retold in Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel The White Ship; 🐆 is the snow leopard of the high ranges, and 🐺 the grey wolf, kök börü, that gave kok-boru its name.

🏙️ is Bishkek, the capital, called Frunze from 1926 to 1991, with its tree-lined avenues and Ala-Too Square. Osh, in the Fergana Valley, celebrated its 3,000th anniversary in 2000; its sacred mountain Sulaiman-Too was the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site. 🕌 is the mosque, from Osh to the wooden Dungan mosque of Karakol, and ⛪ the wooden Holy Trinity Orthodox cathedral in the same town. Along the Silk Road stand the Burana Tower, a minaret left from the city of Balasagun, and the stone caravanserai of Tash Rabat on the way to China.

Manas, holidays and sport: 📖 🌱 🤼

📖 and 📜 are the Manas epic, the story of the hero, his son Semetey and grandson Seytek, one of the longest epic poems in the world. It is not read from a book but recited from memory by manaschy, who can go on for hours; the trilogy is on UNESCO's list, and the main airport, a university and countless streets bear the hero's name. 🪕 is the nearest emoji to the komuz, the three-string fretless lute played with quick flicks of the hand, and 🎤 🎶 stand for the akyns, poets who improvise sung verse duels called aytysh.

Nooruz, the spring New Year on 21 March, is greeted with 🌱 for the wheat sprouts of sümölök and 🍲 for the kazan stirred all night. 🌙 belongs to Orozo Ait and Kurman Ait, the end of Ramadan and the Feast of Sacrifice, both public holidays; most Kyrgyz are Muslim, and there is an Orthodox Christian minority. On 31 August, Independence Day, timelines fill with 🇰🇬🎆 and "Жашасын Кыргызстан!" (Long live Kyrgyzstan!).

🤼 is wrestling, from kuresh at village festivals to the Olympic mats, where most of Kyrgyzstan's Olympic medals have been won. 🏇 🏹 🦅 together are the World Nomad Games, first held on the shore of Issyk-Kul in 2014 with kok-boru, eagle hunting and horseback archery. ⚽ is football, a hugely popular team sport, and 🥊 is cheered for the Bishkek-born UFC champion Valentina Shevchenko.

How to type Kyrgyz letters Ң Ө Ү and the som sign ⃀

Kyrgyz is written in a 36-letter Cyrillic alphabet, with three letters for its own sounds. Ң ң is the "ng" of English sing (жаңы, new), Ө ө is a rounded vowel like German ö (Ысык-Көл), and Ү ү is like German ü (күн, sun and day). Long vowels are written double, as in Нооруз and жаан (rain). Kyrgyz is the state language and Russian an official one; the 2022 census counted 4.39 million fluent Kyrgyz speakers and 2.20 million fluent Russian speakers aged 7+ ; the country's population was 7.4 million at the start of 2026, and Uzbek is widely spoken in the south. The full alphabets are in the Kyrgyz and Russian collections.

To type the letters, add the Kyrgyz keyboard in your system settings (Windows and Gboard on Android have one) or copy them from the grid above. HTML codes are Ң and ң for Ң ң, Ө and ө for Ө ө, Ү and ү for Ү ү; in Word, type 04A3, 04E9 or 04AF and press Alt+X for small ң ө ү. Watch the look-alikes: Ө is not the Greek theta Θ, and Ү is not the Latin Y, even where they look the same.

The som (KGS) is divided into 100 tyiyn. Its sign ⃀ was adopted by the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic and added to Unicode in 2021 as U+20C0 SOM SIGN (HTML ⃀). Because it is so new, older phones and fonts may show an empty box; prices are then written as 500 сом or 500 KGS.