Madagascar Emoji

🇲🇬 the Madagascar flag emoji shows a white vertical band at the hoist and two horizontal bands, red above green. It is not a stored picture but a pair of regional indicator symbols, 🇲 and 🇬, for the country code MG, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters MG instead; the person you send it to still sees the flag on a phone.

The flag was adopted in 1958, two years before independence from France on 26 June 1960. Red and white were the colours of the Merina kingdom that ruled much of the island in the nineteenth century, and green is usually said to stand for the coastal peoples and for hope; the constitution describes the flag's design but assigns no meanings to its colours. Where flags don't show, people write 🤍❤️💚 or ⬜🟥🟩, and the three hearts fill every football and Independence Day post.

The national seal supplies two more symbols: the head of a zebu 🐂, the humped cattle that count as wealth in rural Madagascar, and the leaves of the ravinala or traveller's palm 🌴, a fan-shaped plant of the island that is really a relative of the bird-of-paradise flower. Around them runs the motto Fitiavana – Tanindrazana – Fandrosoana, Love – Fatherland – Progress. 👑 recalls the Merina monarchy and the Rova, the royal compound on the highest hill of Antananarivo, and 🏝️ the island itself, the fourth largest in the world, often called the Great Red Island for its red laterite soil.

Lemur emoji and Madagascar wildlife emoji

Unicode has no lemur emoji, though "lemur emoji" is one of the things people search most about Madagascar. The usual stand-ins are 🐒, for any lemur; 🦝, whose black-and-white ringed tail is the closest match to the ring-tailed lemur, the maky; and 🐁 for the mouse lemurs, the smallest primates in the world. Wild lemurs live only on Madagascar and the nearby Comoros, where people brought them, and more than 100 species are known, from the tiny mouse lemurs to the indri and the aye-aye.

🦎 is the chameleon: Madagascar is home to roughly half of all chameleon species. 🐢 stands for the radiated and ploughshare tortoises, found nowhere else, and for the sea turtles of the coast; 🐸 for the bright red tomato frog; 🐊 for the Nile crocodiles of the rivers and lakes; 🦔 for the tenrecs, some of which look and curl up like hedgehogs; and 🦋 for the comet moth with its long yellow tails. Out at sea, 🐋🐳 are the humpback whales that come to the channel off Île Sainte-Marie from about July to September to calve, and 🐠🪸🤿 the reefs of Nosy Be and the southwest.

🌳 has to stand in for the baobab, since there is no baobab emoji. Six of the world's eight baobab species grow wild only in Madagascar, and the Avenue of the Baobabs near Morondava, a dirt road lined with giant Grandidier's baobabs, is one of the island's most photographed views, best at 🌅. 🌾 is the terraced rice paddies of the highlands, and 🪨⛰️ the tsingy of Bemaraha, a UNESCO World Heritage forest of razor-sharp limestone needles.

Malagasy ariary symbol: how Madagascar writes money

Madagascar pays in the Malagasy ariary, code MGA. There is no Unicode sign for it: prices are written with Ar after the number, French style, as in 10 000 Ar, and banks write MGA 10,000. The ariary replaced the Malagasy franc in 2005 at five francs to one ariary, and some people, especially older ones and market sellers, still quote prices in francs (Fmg), five times the ariary figure.

The ariary is one of only two currencies in the world that are not decimal: one ariary is divided into five iraimbilanja (the other is the Mauritanian ouguiya, divided into five khoums). Its name comes from an old word for a silver dollar coin. For money in a chat, 💰 and 💸 do the job.

Malagasy and French letters to copy and paste

Madagascar has two official languages, Malagasy and French. Malagasy, an Austronesian language whose closest relatives are spoken in southern Borneo, is spoken by almost everyone in a country of about 33 million; the 2018 census found that 23.6% of people aged 3 or older could speak French and 8.2% English. Malagasy has been written in the Latin alphabet since the 1820s, and before that some families wrote it in Arabic letters called sorabe.

The Malagasy alphabet has 21 letters: there is no c, q, u, w or x. Plain o is read like the oo of "food", j like dz, and an i sound at the end of a word is written y, as in Malagasy and tsy (not). Accents are optional and mark the stressed syllable when two words would otherwise look the same: tanàna is a town, tànana a hand. The grave accent can sit on any vowel, which gives à è ì ò and ỳ, and ô writes a true o sound in a few words and names. The French letters é è ê ë à â î ï ô ù û ü ç œ appear in French and in many place names and family names, such as Île Sainte-Marie or Diégo-Suarez, the old name of Antsiranana.

On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys. On a US keyboard in Windows type Alt+0224 for à, Alt+0232 for è, Alt+0236 for ì, Alt+0242 for ò, Alt+0244 for ô, Alt+0233 for é and Alt+0231 for ç; ỳ has no Alt code, so in Word type 1EF3 and press Alt+X, or copy it from the grid. On a Mac press Option+` then the vowel for à è ì ò, Option+I then o for ô, Option+E then e for é and Option+C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. In HTML they are à, è, ì, ò, ô and ỳ for ỳ. The Malagasy and French collections have both alphabets in full.

Malagasy food emoji: vary, romazava and vanilla

Rice, vary, is eaten at almost every meal, and Malagasy people eat more rice per person than almost anyone else, so 🍚 is the real national emoji of the table. Next to it comes laoka, whatever goes with the rice: romazava, the clear broth of beef, often zebu, with leafy greens, counted as the national dish (🍲🥬🥩), and ravitoto, pounded cassava leaves cooked with pork. 🌶️ is sakay, the chili paste on the side.

On the street, 🍢 is zebu brochettes grilled on charcoal, 🥟 is sambos, the fried triangles of the Indian Ocean coast, and 🍜 is mi sao fried noodles and soupe chinoise. Koba, a sweet cake of ground peanuts, banana and rice flour wrapped in banana leaves, is 🍌🥜, and 🍠 stands for cassava and sweet potato. 🥭🥥🍍 are the fruit of the coast; Madagascar is also a big grower of lychees, which arrive in time for Christmas.

There is no vanilla emoji, so 🍦 does the job: Madagascar grows most of the world's natural vanilla, almost all of it in the SAVA region of the northeast, where every flower of the orchid is pollinated by hand. 🍫 is the fine cocoa of the Sambirano valley, ☕ the coffee of the east coast, 🍺 the local beer, 🥃 rhum arrangé, rum steeped with vanilla, fruit or spices, and 🌼 ylang-ylang, the perfume flower grown on Nosy Be.

Independence Day, rugby and salegy: Madagascar emoji for every occasion

26 June, Independence Day (Fetin'ny Fahaleovantena), is one of the biggest holidays of the year. On the evening before, children walk the streets with paper lanterns, arendrina, 🏮, fireworks 🎆🎇 light up Lake Anosy in Antananarivo, and the day itself brings parades and family meals: 🇲🇬🏮🎆. Christmas is big too, in a country where most people are Christians: 🎄⛪ with lychees on the table.

Rugby 🏉 is Madagascar's national passion, and the national team are the Makis, the lemurs, who draw big crowds to the Mahamasina stadium in Antananarivo. In football ⚽ the Barea reached the quarter-finals of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations at their first attempt. 🥊 stands for moraingy, the bare-fisted fighting art of the north and west coasts.

🎸🪗🥁 is Malagasy music: the kabosy, a small box guitar, the accordion, the drums and the valiha, the bamboo tube zither of the highlands that has no emoji of its own. 💃🕺 is salegy, the fast dance music of the north. To get around, 🚐 is the taxi-brousse minibus that links the towns, 🛺 the tuk-tuks of many towns, 🚞 the Fianarantsoa–Manakara railway (currently disrupted), and 🛶⛵ the outrigger pirogues of the Vezo fishermen and the wooden cargo boats of the west coast.

Many people who type "Madagascar emoji" are thinking of the DreamWorks film. Its zoo animals are 🦁 Alex, 🦓 Marty, 🦒 Melman and 🦛 Gloria, with the 🐧 penguins and 🐒👑 King Julien, a ring-tailed lemur. Only the lemurs are true to the island: no lions, zebras, giraffes or penguins live wild in Madagascar.