Lesotho Emoji

🇱🇸 the Lesotho flag emoji shows three horizontal bands, blue, white and green, with a black mokorotlo, the cone-shaped Basotho straw hat, in the middle of the white band. It is encoded as two regional indicator letters, 🇱 and 🇸, for the country code LS, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters LS instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

This is Lesotho's third flag. At independence in 1966 it flew a blue field with a white mokorotlo and green and red stripes along the hoist; after the military coup of 1986 a new flag of 1987 replaced the hat with a traditional shield, spear and knobkerrie. The present flag was raised on 4 October 2006, the 40th anniversary of independence, and brought the hat back. Blue stands for the sky and rain, white for peace and green for the land and prosperity, the three words of the national motto. Where flags don't show, people write the colours as hearts: 💙🤍💚 with 🖤 for the hat.

People often look for a Lesotho hat emoji or Basotho hat emoji, but Unicode has no mokorotlo. The nearest emoji is the straw hat 👒, and the surest way to show the hat is the flag itself. The mokorotlo is woven from grass, and its shape is usually said to copy Qiloane, a cone-shaped hill near Thaba Bosiu; it is worn with traditional dress and the Basotho blanket and turns up on everything from souvenir shops to the Basotho Hat craft shop in Maseru.

Lesotho national symbols: the crocodile, the horses and Khotso, Pula, Nala

The coat of arms puts a crocodile 🐊 on a Basotho shield 🛡️, with a spear and a knobkerrie crossed behind it, two Basotho horses 🐎 holding it up and the flat-topped mountain of Thaba Bosiu ⛰️ beneath. The crocodile, kwena, is the emblem of the Bakoena, the clan of Moshoeshoe I, who gathered the Basotho into one nation in the early 19th century and held off his enemies from the top of Thaba Bosiu. The national football team is called Likuena, the Crocodiles, so 🐊⚽ is a match-day post.

The motto on the ribbon is Khotso, Pula, Nala: Peace, Rain, Prosperity, which you can write as 🕊️🌧️🌾. Khotso is also an everyday greeting, and speakers often close with the full motto. Lesotho is a kingdom 👑; King Letsie III is the head of state in a constitutional monarchy, and his birthday on 17 July is a public holiday.

Lesotho currency symbol: loti, maloti and M

The Lesotho loti (plural maloti, ISO code LSL) is divided into 100 lisente and has been issued since 1980. It is pegged one to one to the South African rand, and rand notes are accepted everywhere in the country alongside it. There is no special Unicode sign: prices are written with a capital M for maloti, as in M50 or M 1,000, and sometimes with L for a single loti. That M is the "Lesotho currency symbol m" people search for. In chats people add 🪙, 💵 or 💰.

The name comes from the Maloti, the mountains that cover most of the country. Wool and mohair from sheep 🐑 and Angora goats 🐐, diamonds 💎 from mountain mines and water sold to South Africa are the classic earners, and Maseru's garment factories sew jeans 👖 and other clothes for export to the United States.

Sesotho letters: š and Lesotho spelling

Sesotho is the national language and, with English, an official one. By CLDR estimates about 2.2 million people in Lesotho speak Sesotho, almost the whole population, and about 600,000 use English; smaller groups speak Zulu, Xhosa and Phuthi. Sesotho is written with the Latin alphabet, and the one letter beyond A–Z in Lesotho's spelling is š, which appears in the group tš, an aspirated ts sound, as in the name Tšepo and the Letšeng diamond mine.

Lesotho and South Africa spell Sesotho differently. South African spelling writes tsh where Lesotho writes tš (Tshepo and Tšepo), tjh where Lesotho writes ch (tjhelete and chelete, money), w where Lesotho writes o (Moshweshwe and Moshoeshoe), and d before i and u where Lesotho writes l (Dumela and Lumela, hello). So a sign in Maseru and a sign in Bloemfontein can spell the same word two ways.

To type š on Windows hold Alt and type 0154 (0138 for Š). On a Mac, hold down the s key and choose š from the menu that pops up; on a phone, long-press s. In HTML they are š and Š. For the whole alphabet see the Southern Sotho collection; English, Zulu and Xhosa have their own pages, and the South Africa collection covers Lesotho's only neighbour.

The Kingdom in the Sky: mountains, snow and ponies in emoji

Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa and lies higher than any other country: all of it is above 1,000 m, and its lowest point, where the Senqu (Orange) River leaves the country, is about 1,400 m. Thabana Ntlenyana, at 3,482 m, is the highest peak in southern Africa. 🏔️ ⛰️ and 🌄 are the emoji for it, and in winter, from June to August, snow ❄️🌨️ closes passes and settles on the villages. Afriski in the northern Maloti is one of very few ski resorts in southern Africa, so ⛷️🎿🏂 and even ☃️ are real Lesotho emoji.

Water 💧 is the country's other mountain wealth. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project dams the high rivers at Katse and Mohale and sends water through tunnels to Gauteng, with a hydropower station at Muela. At Semonkong the Maletsunyane Falls drop about 190 m into a gorge 🏞️, and adventurous visitors abseil 🧗 down beside them.

The way to get around the mountains is still on horseback. The sturdy Basotho pony 🐎 carries farmers, herders and trekking tourists 🏇 along paths no car can use. Visitors in a 4x4 🚙 drive up the hairpins of Sani Pass from South Africa to Sani Top, whose chalet calls itself the highest pub in Africa, and the Roof of Africa rally sends enduro motorcycles 🏍️ over the same rough country.

Blankets, food, famo and Independence Day: emoji people send

The Basotho blanket, a heavy patterned woollen blanket worn pinned at the shoulder like a cloak, is the country's best-known dress; the fashion took hold after Moshoeshoe I was given one in the 19th century, and patterns mark occasions from weddings to a boy's coming of age. There is no blanket emoji, so in chats 🐑🧶 or the flag stands in for it. Villages of round stone and thatch houses 🛖 keep cattle 🐄, sheep and goats, and herders bring them up to summer grazing in the high valleys.

At the table, 🌽 is papa, stiff maize porridge, eaten with 🥬 moroho, cooked greens, 🫘 beans and, on special days, mutton or beef 🍖🍲. 🍞 is bohobe, bread, 🥛 mafi, soured milk, and 🍺 either home-brewed sorghum beer, joala, or a cold Maluti lager.

Music means famo, the accordion-and-drum sound 🪗🥁 sung in Sesotho, which grew out of the songs of Basotho miners who worked in South Africa's gold mines ⛏️. Dance troupes 💃🕺, among them men stamping and leaping in the mohobelo, and church choirs ⛪🎤 fill every celebration. Sesotho was written down early by missionaries at Morija from 1833, and Thomas Mofolo's novel Chaka 📖, written in Sesotho and published at Morija in 1925, is a classic of African literature.

Independence Day, 4 October, marks the day in 1966 when Basutoland became the Kingdom of Lesotho; the emoji are 🇱🇸🎉🎆 with Happy Independence Day or Khotso!. Moshoeshoe's Day on 11 March honours the founder, the King's Birthday on 17 July is 👑🎂, and Christmas 🎄 brings families home from the towns and from South Africa.