Liberia Emoji

🇱🇷 the Liberia flag emoji shows eleven horizontal stripes, six red and five white, with a blue square in the upper corner holding a single white star. Like every flag emoji it is not a picture stored in the text but two regional indicator letters, 🇱 and 🇷, for Liberia's country code LR, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you'll see the letters LR, while the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone.

The flag was adopted on 24 August 1847, a month after independence, and 24 August is still Flag Day. The eleven stripes are usually explained as the eleven men who signed Liberia's Declaration of Independence, red and white as courage and moral excellence, the blue square as Africa and the star as Liberia itself, for a long time the only independent republic on the continent. That star gave the flag its nickname, the Lone Star, which is also the name of the national football team. Where flags don't show, people write ❤️🤍💙 or 🟥⬜🟦 with a ⭐.

"Liberian flag vs American flag" is one of the most searched questions about it, and the likeness is deliberate: the republic grew from settlements of free Black Americans, some formerly enslaved, and Africans liberated from slave ships; its flag was modelled on the Stars and Stripes 🇺🇸. The difference is easy to see once you know it: Liberia has eleven stripes and one large star, the United States thirteen stripes and fifty small stars.

Liberia national symbols: "The love of liberty brought us here"

Liberia's coat of arms shows a sailing ship ⛵ arriving at the coast, the ships that carried settlers from America, with a palm tree 🌴, a plough and a spade 🪏 on the shore, the sun rising over the sea 🌅, and a white dove 🕊️ flying with a scroll 📜 in its beak. Above it runs the motto The love of liberty brought us here, which Liberians still quote in speeches and Independence Day posts. The national bird is the pepper bird, the garden bulbul, known for singing before dawn; 🐦 is the closest emoji.

The first settlers landed at Cape Mesurado in 1822, sent by the American Colonization Society, and the town they built was named Monrovia after the US president James Monroe. The country's name comes from the Latin liber, free. Liberia declared independence on 26 July 1847, which makes it Africa's oldest republic. The settlers and their descendants, the Americo-Liberians, ruled for more than a century over the peoples who already lived there; today the country counts sixteen indigenous ethnic groups, among them the Kpelle, Bassa, Gio (Dan), Mano, Kru, Grebo, Krahn, Vai, Gola, Kissi, Lorma, Mandingo and Mende.

Liberian dollar symbol: how to write Liberia's money

The Liberian dollar, ISO code LRD, uses the ordinary dollar sign $, typed with Shift+4 on a U.S. keyboard. To keep it apart from the US dollar, Liberians write L$ or LD$ before the amount, as in L$500, and say "Liberty" for Liberian money in everyday talk. There is no separate Unicode sign for it.

US dollars 💵 circulate side by side with Liberian dollars, and both are used for everyday buying: rent, school fees and bigger purchases are often priced in US dollars, a cup of rice at the market in LD. A price tag that just says $ can therefore mean either, which is why "US$20" and "L$2,000" are written out in full. 💰 and 🪙 are the emoji for money in general.

Kpelle letters and the Vai script: Liberia's own writing

English is Liberia's official language, spoken by about 4.5 million people by CLDR's estimate, and most of them speak Liberian English, the everyday Kolokwa, at home and in the street (see the Liberian English collection). Next to it more than twenty African languages are spoken. The largest is Kpelle, with about 1.1 million speakers in Liberia, followed by Bassa, the Kru languages, Grebo, Dan, Mano, Kisi and Vai (CLDR estimates). Written in Latin letters, Liberian Kpelle uses ɓ, ɛ, ɔ, ŋ and ɣ (a voiced velar fricative); ɲ and ə belong to the Guinean orthography, not the Liberian one. Kpelle's own name for itself is Kpɛlɛɛ. Bassa, Grebo, Dan and Mano use several of the same letters, and all these languages are tonal, so accents over vowels may mark tone.

To type these Liberian Kpelle letters on Windows in Word, enter the code and press Alt+X: 0253 for ɓ, 025B for ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 014B for ŋ and 0263 for ɣ; for capitals use 0181 Ɓ, 0190 Ɛ, 0186 Ɔ, 014A Ŋ and 0194 Ɣ. On a Mac switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard, hold Option and type the same codes. On a phone it is easiest to copy them from this page.

Liberia is also the home of the Vai script, one of the best-known writing systems invented in Africa. It was created in the 1830s by Momolu Duwalu Bukele, a Vai man from the Grand Cape Mount area, and was soon used for letters, records and accounts. It is a syllabary: each sign stands for a whole syllable, so ꕞꔤꔫꕩ, Laibhiya, is Liberia in four signs, ꕙꔤ is Vai, and ꕜꕞꕌ, Dala, is the dollar, the forms used by the Unicode CLDR project. Vai has been in Unicode since 2008 with its own comma ꘍, full stop ꘎ and question mark ꘏; the full syllabary is in the Vai collection. The Bassa have their own alphabet too, Bassa Vah, added to Unicode in 2014 (see the Bassa and Kpelle collections).

Liberia emoji for holidays, food and football

Independence Day on 26 July is 🇱🇷🎉🎆, with church services, parades and "Happy Independence Day, Liberia!" in every family chat, and Flag Day follows on 24 August. On Decoration Day, the second Wednesday of March, families clean and whitewash the graves of their relatives and lay flowers on them, 🪦💐. Liberia keeps its own Thanksgiving on the first Thursday of November, a day of church services ⛪🙏. Most Liberians are Christian, and at Christmas 🎄 children and friends greet you with "My Christmas on you!", which means: you owe me a Christmas present 🎁. Eid ☪️🕌🌙 is celebrated by the Muslim Mandingo, Vai and others.

Liberians say that if you haven't eaten rice today, you haven't eaten, so 🍚 is the base of most food posts. Over the rice goes a soup or sauce: palm butter 🌴🍛, made from palm nuts; cassava leaf and potato greens 🥬, the young leaves of cassava and sweet potato 🍠; groundpea soup 🥜, from peanuts; and pepper soup 🌶️🍲, hot enough to need no other caption. Jollof rice 🥘🍗, fried plantain 🍌, fufu and dumboy, both pounded cassava, rice bread 🍞 and homemade ginger beer 🫚 complete the table; 🍺 stands for palm wine and the local beer.

Football is the national sport, and the national team is the Lone Star, ⚽🇱🇷. Its greatest player, George Weah, won the Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player of the Year in 1995 while at AC Milan, and later became Liberia's president, from 2018 to 2024; ⚽🏆🇱🇷 is for him. Off the pitch, Liberians greet friends with the snap handshake: you shake, then pull your hands apart so your fingers catch and snap, 🤝🫰. In Monrovia people get around by kekeh, the three-wheel taxis 🛺, and pen-pen, the motorbike taxis 🏍️, to a soundtrack of hipco 🎤🎶, Liberian hip-hop in Liberian English.

Liberia's forests, coast and the ships that fly its flag

Liberia still has the largest remaining part of West Africa's Upper Guinean rainforest, and Sapo National Park 🏞️🌳 is its best-known corner. Forest elephants 🐘, chimpanzees 🐒, leopards 🐆 and crocodiles 🐊 live there, and most of the pygmy hippos 🦛 left in the wild, the small forest cousin of the hippo that became famous worldwide through the baby Moo Deng in 2024. Sea turtles 🐢 nest on the beaches, and Mount Nimba ⛰️ rises on the border with Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. Monrovia is one of the rainiest capitals in the world, so 🌧️☔ needs no explanation from May to October.

On the coast, Robertsport near the Sierra Leone border is known for its long surf breaks 🏄🌊, and the Kru people, who for generations worked as sailors on European ships along the coast, still fish from long wooden canoes 🛶. Inland, the Firestone plantation at Harbel, opened in 1926, is one of the largest rubber plantations in the world 🌳🛞, and iron ore ⛏️ travels by train 🚂 from the mountains to the ports; diamonds 💎 and gold are mined too.

If you searched "Liberia flag vessel", you have seen 🇱🇷 on the back of a tanker or container ship 🚢⚓. Liberia runs one of the world's largest ship registries, which shipowners anywhere can join, so a large share of the world's merchant fleet flies the Lone Star even though the ships may never visit Monrovia.