Malaysia Emoji & Symbols

🇲🇾 the Malaysia flag is the emoji Malaysians put in their bios, under Merdeka photos and after every badminton or football result. Beside it come the flag's colours as hearts, ❤️🤍💙💛, and the 🌙⭐ of its crescent and star. 👑 stands for the monarchy, which Malaysia arranges like nowhere else: the nine hereditary Malay rulers choose one of themselves as king, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, for a five-year term.

🌺 the hibiscus is the bunga raya, the national flower; its five petals are usually explained as the five principles of the Rukun Negara, the national charter, and its red as courage. 🐯 and 🐅 are the Malayan tiger, the national animal: two tigers hold up the shield of the coat of arms, and the national football team is called Harimau Malaya, the Malayan Tigers, so 🇲🇾🐯⚽ is the classic match-day post.

The rest of the grid follows a country of many peoples and festivals. Malays, Chinese and Indian Malaysians, the Iban, Kadazan-Dusun and other peoples of Sabah and Sarawak, and the Orang Asli of the peninsula all send their own emoji: ☪️ 🕌 🤲 for Islam, 🧧 🏮 for Chinese New Year, 🪔 🛕 for Deepavali and Thaipusam, 🌾 for the harvest festivals of Borneo, 🎄 for Christmas. Then come 🏢🏢 the Petronas Twin Towers, 🦧 🌳 the rainforest of Borneo, 🍚 🫓 ☕ the food everyone argues about, 🪁 🗡️ 🧵 the kite, keris and batik of Malay craft, and 🏸, the sport that stops the country.

Malaysia flag emoji 🇲🇾: the Jalur Gemilang and its meaning

The flag is called the Jalur Gemilang, "Stripes of Glory", a name it was given in 1997. It has fourteen horizontal stripes of red and white and a dark blue canton with a yellow crescent and a yellow fourteen-pointed star, the Bintang Persekutuan or Federal Star. The fourteen stripes and points stood for the fourteen member states of 1963, when Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore formed Malaysia; Singapore left in 1965, and today they are read as the thirteen states and the federal territories. Blue stands for the unity of the people, yellow is the royal colour of the rulers, and the crescent stands for Islam.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇲🇾 is not a stored picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇾, for the country code MY. Phones, Mac and most browsers draw the pair as one flag; Windows, whose emoji font has no country flags, shows the two letters instead, but the person you send it to on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook still sees the flag. Its neighbours on the flag keyboard are 🇸🇬 Singapore across the Johor Causeway, 🇧🇳 Brunei, which Malaysia surrounds on Borneo, 🇮🇩 Indonesia, which shares Borneo with it, and 🇹🇭 Thailand to the north.

Holidays: Merdeka, Hari Raya, Chinese New Year, Deepavali

31 August is Hari Merdeka, the national day, marking the independence of Malaya from Britain in 1957, when Tunku Abdul Rahman cried "Merdeka!" in Stadium Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur. Flags hang from every balcony and car for weeks, and the day brings parades, 🎆 fireworks and "Selamat Hari Merdeka 🇲🇾" (officially Hari Kebangsaan). 16 September, Malaysia Day, marks the founding of Malaysia itself in 1963 and matters especially in Sabah and Sarawak.

At the end of Ramadan comes Hari Raya Aidilfitri. Families break the fast at sunset (🌇🍽️) through the month, light oil lamps called pelita on the last nights, then drive home to their villages (balik kampung), eat ketupat and rendang, ask forgiveness with "Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir dan Batin" and give children duit raya money in green packets, which is why 💚 sits next to 🌙 in so many Raya messages. Open houses, rumah terbuka, welcome neighbours of every faith; 🕋 belongs to Hari Raya Haji and the Hajj rituals in Mecca.

Chinese New Year brings 🧧 ang pow red packets, 🏮 lanterns, 🍊 mandarin oranges, 🧨 firecrackers, 🦁 lion dances and 🐉 dragon dances, and the greeting "Gong Xi Fa Cai". At Deepavali Hindu families light 🪔 lamps, draw kolam patterns at the door, put on 🥻 saris and new clothes and send "Selamat Hari Deepavali". Thaipusam draws huge crowds to the 🛕 Batu Caves; Wesak ☸️🪷 is a public holiday for Buddhists, the Mid-Autumn festival brings 🥮 mooncakes and lanterns, Sarawak celebrates the rice harvest at Gawai Dayak on 1 June and Sabah at Kaamatan in May (🌾🍶, with home-brewed rice wine, tuak in Sarawak), and Christmas 🎄 is a public holiday, celebrated above all in Sabah and Sarawak.

From the Twin Towers to Kinabalu: places, rainforest and sea

In Kuala Lumpur the 452-metre Petronas Twin Towers (🏢🏢, or 🏙️ for the skyline) were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004, joined by a skybridge between their 41st and 42nd floors. The nearby Menara Kuala Lumpur (🗼) is a 421-metre telecommunications tower, and the city's monorail (🚝) runs through Bukit Bintang. North of the city, 272 rainbow-painted steps lead up to the Batu Caves temple beside a giant golden statue of Lord Murugan (🛕).

Penang means 🌉 the Penang Bridge and George Town, whose street murals of children on a real bicycle (🎨🚲) became a favourite photo; George Town and Melaka together are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Langkawi has its cable car and sky bridge (🚠) and island-hopping among its archipelago (🏝️🏖️), and the cool Cameron Highlands are tea plantations and strawberry farms (🍵🍓).

Borneo, where Sabah and Sarawak lie, is rainforest country (🌳🌿🏞️) with afternoon downpours (🌧️), Iban longhouses (🛖) on the rivers, and wildlife people travel for: orangutans (🦧) at Sepilok and Semenggoh, proboscis monkeys and macaques (🐒), Bornean pygmy elephants (🐘), the sun bear (🐻), crocodiles (🐊), monitor lizards (🦎) and the Rajah Brooke's birdwing, the national butterfly (🦋). Mount Kinabalu (🏔️), 4,095 metres, is the country's highest peak, and Sipadan, off Sabah, is among the most famous dive sites in the world for its turtles and reef walls (🐢🐠🪸🤿). Oil palm plantations (🌴) and the oil and gas of Petronas (🛢️⛽) are the other side of the landscape.

Nasi lemak, roti canai and teh tarik: Malaysian food emoji

Nasi lemak, usually called the national dish, is rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf, served with sambal, fried anchovies (ikan bilis), peanuts, cucumber and a boiled egg, often wrapped in a banana leaf, so it is spelled out in emoji as 🍚🥥🌶️🥜🥚🥒🐟 or simply 🍚🍃. At a mamak stall, run by Indian Muslims and open late into the night, people order roti canai (🫓) with dhal or curry (🍛) and teh tarik (☕), "pulled tea", poured from a height between two mugs until it froths.

The hawker centre adds satay with peanut sauce (🍢 is the nearest emoji), laksa, char kway teow and wantan mee (🍜), Hainanese chicken rice (🍗🍚), dim sum (🥟), banana-leaf rice (🍌🍃🍛) and seafood (🦐🦀🦑). For dessert there is cendol and ais kacang, shaved ice with syrups and toppings (🍧), and fruit from 🥭 mango to 🍍 pineapple. The fruit Malaysians love most has no emoji at all: Unicode has no durian, the spiky "king of fruits" whose smell gets it banned from many hotels and trains.

Ringgit symbol RM and Jawi letters: how to type them

The ringgit symbol is RM, for Ringgit Malaysia, written before the amount with or without a space: RM10, RM 5.50. The currency code is MYR and one ringgit has 100 sen. Unicode has no separate ringgit sign, so there is nothing special to copy: type the capital letters R and M. 💵 and 🪙 cover notes and coins. The word ringgit means "jagged" in Malay, after the serrated edges of the Spanish silver dollars that once circulated in the region.

Malay, the national language (Bahasa Malaysia), is written in Latin letters called Rumi, plain A–Z with no accents. One letter does double duty: e writes both the schwa of emak and the clear e of enak, and the spelling does not tell them apart, so you learn each word. The older alphabet is Jawi, the Arabic script adapted for Malay, still used in religious teaching, on mosques and on many official and shop signs, especially in Kelantan and Terengganu. Jawi adds six letters for Malay sounds Arabic does not have: چ ca, ڠ nga, ڤ pa, ݢ ga, ڽ nya and ۏ va. Watch the look-alikes: ڠ has three dots where Arabic غ has one, and ݢ is a keheh with one dot above. Jawi runs right to left and its letters join, so a pasted letter changes shape inside a word; most computers have no Jawi layout switched on, so tap it in the grid or add an Arabic-script or Jawi keyboard on your phone.

Malaysia's languages each have their own collection. By CLDR estimates, about 26 million people speak Malay, about 7 million English, about 6 million Chinese (Mandarin in schools, Hokkien and Cantonese on the street), about 1.5 million Tamil and some 860,000 Iban, the largest language of Sarawak, in a country of about 35 million. See our Malay, Malay (Arabic), Chinese, Tamil and Iban collections, and the neighbouring Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia pages.