Latvia Emoji

The Latvia flag emoji 🇱🇻 shows two wide bands of a deep, brownish red with a narrow white stripe between them; the stripe is half as wide as each red band. Latvians call the shade carmine or simply "Latvian red". People who want the colours without the flag write ❤️🤍❤️ or 🟥⬜🟥.

It is one of the oldest flags in the world: a 13th-century German verse chronicle, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, describes a red banner with a white stripe carried by Latgalian warriors. The best-known legend tells of a wounded chieftain wrapped in a white sheet; where his blood soaked through, the cloth turned red and the middle stayed white. It became the national flag of independent Latvia after 1918, was banned during the Soviet occupation and was restored in 1990.

Like every country flag, 🇱🇻 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇱 + 🇻 for the country code LV. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters LV instead, but the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇱🇻. It is easy to mix up with Austria 🇦🇹: the Austrian flag has three equal stripes in a brighter red, the Latvian one a darker red and a thinner white stripe.

Latvian letters Ā Č Ē Ģ Ī Ķ Ļ Ņ Š Ū Ž and the euro sign

The Latvian alphabet has 33 letters: the Latin ones without Q, W, X and Y, plus eleven with marks. The macron on Ā ā, Ē ē, Ī ī, Ū ū makes the vowel long, which is often the only thing that tells two words apart: Rīga is written with a long ī, and so are Jūrmala and Liepāja. The caron on Č č, Š š, Ž ž gives the sounds of English ch, sh and the s in measure.

Ģ ģ, Ķ ķ, Ļ ļ, Ņ ņ are soft (palatal) versions of g, k, l and n, as in Jāņi, the Midsummer feast, or ķimenes, the caraway in Jāņi cheese. Unicode calls their mark a cedilla, but Latvian type draws it as a small comma below the letter, and on small ģ as a turned comma above it. Older spelling also had Ō and Ŗ; both were dropped from standard Latvian in 1946, though Latvian exile communities went on using them for decades.

To type them, add the Latvian (QWERTY) keyboard: on Windows AltGr plus a letter gives the marked form (AltGr+A = ā, AltGr+C = č, AltGr+G = ģ), and the apostrophe key works as a dead key. Macs have a Latvian layout too, and on a phone you hold the base letter and pick the variant. Otherwise copy them from the grid above.

Latvian quotation marks open low and close high, „Labdien!“, and guillemets «…» are also used. Latvia has paid in euros € since 1 January 2014; the lats before it was written Ls. The Latvian €1 and €2 coins show a young Latvian woman, the same design that was on the pre-war five-lats coin.

Latvia emoji for food: rye bread, grey peas and Jāņi cheese

Dark rye bread, rupjmaize, is on every Latvian table, so 🍞🌾 is the most Latvian food pair there is. 🫛🥓 stands for grey peas with bacon, often named as the national dish, and 🥓 alone for pīrāgi, the little crescent buns filled with bacon and onion that are baked for every celebration. 🧀 is Jāņu siers, the round fresh cheese with caraway seeds made for Midsummer.

🐟🥫 means Riga sprats, small smoked fish packed in oil in flat tins, and 🐟 also covers the herring eaten with potatoes 🥔 and cottage cheese. 🥕🥧 is sklandrausis, a rye pastry from Kurzeme filled with potato and sweet carrot, and 🫜🥒🥛 the pink cold soup of beetroot, cucumber and kefir that cools summer days.

Forests cover about half of Latvia, and late summer means 🍄 mushroom picking and 🫐 bilberries; 🍎 is the apple of every farm orchard and 🍯 the honey. 🍫 is Laima, the Riga chocolate maker, 🍺🍻 the beer that flows at Jāņi, and 🥃 Riga Black Balsam, a dark herbal liqueur made to an 18th-century recipe.

Latvian symbols and their meanings

Latvia's national symbols fit neatly into emoji: the white wagtail 🐦 is the national bird, the ox-eye daisy 🌼 the national flower, the oak and the linden 🌳 the national trees and the two-spot ladybird 🐞 the national insect. The coat of arms has a rising sun ☀️, three stars ⭐ for the historical regions Kurzeme, Vidzeme and Latgale, a red lion 🦁 and a silver griffin. The same three stars are held up by the woman on top of the Freedom Monument in Riga.

When people search for Latvian symbols and meanings they usually mean the old folk signs woven into belts, knitted into mittens and carved into wood. Auseklis, the morning star, is an eight-pointed star of crossed lines, and ✴️ is the closest character; it became a sign of the national revival in the late 1980s. Saule, the sun ☀️, is a circle with rays; Unicode has no exact characters for any of these signs. One sign people ask about is the ugunskrusts or pērkonkrusts (fire cross, thunder cross), an ancient swastika-shaped sign that Latvian folk ornament used for centuries and Latvia's air force carried between the wars; it remains in use in folk art despite its Nazi associations, though it is not part of this set.

🐻 is Lāčplēsis, the Bear-Slayer, hero of the national epic, with bear's ears that gave him his strength. 🗄️ is the Dainu skapis, the wooden cabinet of drawers in which the folklorist Krišjānis Barons filed hundreds of thousands of dainas, short four-line folk songs; it is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. 🧤🧶 stand for patterned Latvian mittens, once part of every bride's dowry, and 🧵 for the red-and-white woven Lielvārde belt.

Away from the city, 🌲 pine forest and bogs, 🌊 the Baltic coast with its white sand beaches 🏖️ at Jūrmala, and lakes with swans 🦢 make up the country, home to deer 🦌, elk 🫎, wild boar 🐗, wolves 🐺 and beavers 🦫. 🧖🪵 is the pirts, the Latvian sauna, where steam and birch or oak whisks are part of the ritual.

Riga, Jāņi and the Latvian holidays people send emoji for

The historic centre of Riga 🏙️ is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the finest collections of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe. Its church spires ⛪ carry golden roosters 🐓 as weathervanes, and the Cat House in the Old Town has two black cats 🐈‍⬛ on its turrets, with their tails, the story goes, once turned towards the Great Guild across the street. 🕰️ is the Laima clock, Riga's classic meeting place, and 🏰 covers Rundāle Palace and the castles of Turaida and Cēsis.

Jāņi, on 23 and 24 June, is the biggest holiday of the year. People leave the cities for the countryside, men wear wreaths of oak leaves 🍃 and women wreaths of flowers 💐, everyone sings songs with the refrain līgo, and a bonfire 🔥 burns all night, often a tar barrel on a tall pole. The brave look for the fern flower 🌿 that blooms only that night, and the rest stay up to greet the sunrise 🌅. The greeting is Priecīgus Jāņus!

Riga claims the first decorated Christmas tree 🎄, in 1510, and a plaque in Town Hall Square marks the spot; Tallinn in neighbouring Estonia disputes it. At Meteņi, the end of winter, people sled downhill 🛷, and at Easter (Lieldienas) they dye eggs 🥚 in onion skins, knock them together and swing on swings. On 11 November, Lāčplēsis Day, candles 🕯️ line the wall of Riga Castle, and 18 November is Proclamation Day, the birthday of the state in 1918. On 4 May, the day independence was restored in 1990, families set tables with white tablecloths.

On 23 August 1989 about two million people joined hands 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 in the Baltic Way, a human chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. And roughly every five years, tens of thousands of singers and dancers 🎶🎤💃🕺 fill Riga for the Song and Dance Festival, held since 1873 and recognised by UNESCO together with those of Estonia and Lithuania.

Latvia in sport: hockey, basketball and more

Ice hockey 🏒 is the national passion. In 2023, at the World Championship that Latvia co-hosted with Finland, the team beat the United States to win bronze 🥉, its first ever medal, and the government gave the country a day off to celebrate. Basketball 🏀 runs just as deep: Latvia won the very first EuroBasket in 1935, Kristaps Porziņģis plays in the NBA, and the men's 3x3 team took Olympic gold in Tokyo.

Jeļena Ostapenko 🎾 won the French Open in 2017, unseeded, at 20. Māris Štrombergs won Olympic gold in BMX 🚴 in 2008 and 2012, beach volleyball 🏐 pairs have brought home Olympic and European medals, and Sigulda's bobsleigh and luge track 🛷 is the home of skeleton star Martins Dukurs. Riga also gave chess ♟️ the eighth world champion, Mikhail Tal, "the Magician from Riga".