Maldives Emoji

🇲🇻 the Maldives flag emoji is a red field with a green rectangle in the middle and a white crescent inside the green. Like every country flag emoji it is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇻, for the country code MV (U+1F1F2 U+1F1FB), which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters MV, while the person you send them to still sees the flag.

Red stands for the blood of the national heroes who gave their lives for the country, green for peace and prosperity, and the crescent for Islam, the faith of the Maldives. The flag took its present form in 1965, the year the country became fully independent from Britain. Where flag emoji don't show, people write it in its colours: ❤️💚🤍, or 🟥🟩🌙 with the crescent. ☪️ stands for the crescent and star of the national emblem, which also has a coconut palm 🌴 and two crossed national flags.

The national symbols people look up have no emoji of their own, so they borrow the nearest: the coconut palm 🌴 is the national tree, the pink rose 🌹 the national flower, the white-breasted waterhen, kanbili in Dhivehi, the national bird 🐦, and the tuna 🐟, on which the islands have lived for centuries, is often given as the national animal.

Island, reef and honeymoon emoji for Maldives captions

The Maldives is a chain of 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean, rings of coral reef holding about 1,190 low islands 🏝️, of which some 200 are inhabited and well over a hundred more are resorts. The word atoll itself comes from Dhivehi atholhu. Around them is one of the richest reefs in the world 🪸: reef fish 🐠 and pufferfish 🐡, octopus 🐙, crabs 🦀 and lobster 🦞, sea turtles 🐢, spinner dolphins 🐬, reef sharks and the whale sharks 🦈🐋 of South Ari Atoll, and the manta rays that gather at Hanifaru Bay in Baa Atoll, which have no emoji and borrow 🐟 or 🐋. On some beaches plankton glows blue in the waves at night, the "sea of stars" people post as ✨🌊🌌.

Most visitors fly into Velana International Airport near Malé ✈️🛬 and go on by speedboat 🚤 or seaplane 🛩️, which is why 🛬🛩️🏝️ opens so many trip posts. Resorts each take a whole island, often with villas built out over the lagoon; 🏨 and 🛖 are the closest emoji, with 🍹 at sunset 🌅 and 💍💑 for the honeymoons the country is famous for. Snorkelling and diving 🤿, surfing 🏄 on the reef breaks of the outer atolls, kayaking 🛶 and sunset fishing 🎣 fill the days.

Since 2009 visitors can also stay in guesthouses on local islands, where life follows Maldivian custom: modest clothes in the villages and swimwear 👙 on the marked tourist beaches. For Instagram the usual pattern is the place plus two or three emoji, as in Maldives 🇲🇻🏝️🌊 or Paradise found 🐢🤿💙.

Maldives currency symbol: MVR, Rf and the rufiyaa

The official rufiyaa sign is ⃂ (U+20C2), added in Unicode 18.0. Prices are written MVR in banking and on exchange boards, Rf or MRf in English, and in Dhivehi text the rufiyaa is also shortened to the letter raa ރ with a full stop. One rufiyaa is 100 laari 🪙. Resorts usually quote prices in US dollars 💵, while shops and cafés on local islands price in rufiyaa 💰.

Long before paper money the Maldives was a money exporter of a different kind: its lagoons were the great source of cowrie shells 🐚, which were used as currency from Bengal to West Africa for centuries. Ibn Battuta, who lived in the islands in the 1340s, wrote that cowries were the islanders' money and were shipped away by the boatload.

Dhivehi letters: Thaana script to copy and paste

Dhivehi is the national language, spoken by about 380,000 people by CLDR's estimate; the 2022 census counted 515,132 residents, including 382,639 Maldivians. It is an Indo-Aryan language, a close relative of Sinhala in Sri Lanka, and it is written in its own script, Thaana, which runs right to left like Arabic. Thaana took over from the older Dhives Akuru script by the 18th century. Its 24 basic letters have a famous origin: the first nine, ހ ށ ނ ރ ބ ޅ ކ އ ވ (haa to vaavu), were formed from Arabic digits, and the next nine, މ ފ ދ ތ ލ ގ ޏ ސ ޑ, from old Indic digits. The dotted letters ޘ ޙ ޚ ޛ ޜ ޝ ޞ ޟ ޠ ޡ ޢ ޣ ޤ ޥ, called thikijehi Thaana, write the sounds of Arabic words and names: ޝުކުރިއްޔާ, shukuriyyaa, thank you, starts with sheenu ޝ.

The vowels are not letters but marks, the fili, set above or below a letter: ަ ާ for a and aa, ި ީ for i and ee, ު ޫ for u and oo, ެ ޭ for e and ey, ޮ ޯ for o and oa. Every letter must carry a fili or the sukun ް, which means "no vowel". Alifu އ is the silent carrier for a vowel that starts a syllable, and with sukun it doubles the next consonant. Paste ދ ި ވ ެ ހ ި in that order and the marks settle onto the letters as ދިވެހި, Dhivehi; ދިވެހިރާއްޖެ, Dhivehi Raajje, is the country's own name.

To type Dhivehi on Windows, add Divehi under Settings › Time & language › Language & region; Windows offers a Divehi Phonetic layout, where the keys follow English letters, and a Divehi Typewriter layout, then switch with Windows+Space. On phones, many keyboard apps offer Dhivehi, or copy the letters from the grid. Dhivehi uses the Arabic comma ،, question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛, and ordinary digits 0–9. For the full alphabet see the Divehi collection; English, which by CLDR's estimate about 290,000 people in the Maldives speak, is the language of schools, business and the resorts, and has its own collection.

Maldivian food emoji: mas huni, garudhiya and short eats

Maldivian cooking is built on tuna 🐟, coconut 🥥, chilli 🌶️, onion 🧅 and lime 🍋‍🟩. Mas huni, the breakfast everyone names first, is shredded tuna mixed with grated coconut, onion and chilli, eaten with roshi, a thin flatbread 🫓. Garudhiya is a clear tuna broth 🍲 poured over rice 🍚 with lime, chilli and onion, and mas riha is fish curry 🍛.

In the afternoon people meet in teashops over sweet tea ☕ and hedhikaa, the short eats laid out on the counter: bajiya, pastry triangles filled with tuna 🥟, gulha, little fried balls of dough and fish, and many more. Bananas 🍌 and mangoes 🥭 grow on the islands, and fresh coconut 🥥 is drunk straight from the nut.

Holidays, faith, music and sport

The Maldives is a Muslim country, and has been since 1153. 🕌 stands for its mosques, among them the Hukuru Miskiy, the Old Friday Mosque of Malé, built in 1658 of carved coral stone. Ramadan and the two Eids bring 🌙🤲 and 📿. Independence Day on 26 July is the big national celebration, with 🇲🇻🎆🎉, parades and fireworks over Malé; National Day, set by the Islamic calendar, marks Muhammad Thakurufaanu's victory over the Portuguese in 1573.

🥁 is for bodu beru, "big drum": a group of drummers and singers whose rhythm starts slow and speeds up until the dancers are carried away, played at weddings, festivals and on beach nights. Football ⚽ is the most popular sport, and the national team won the South Asian SAFF Championship 🏆 in 2008 and 2018. 🎾 stands for bashi, a traditional women's game played with tennis rackets, in which the server stands with her back to the net and sends the ball over her head.

Malé 🏙️ is one of the most densely built capitals in the world, packed onto a single small island; the Sinamalé Bridge 🌉, opened in 2018, joins it to the airport island and Hulhumalé. Most of the country lies little more than a metre above the sea, so rising seas 🌊🌡️ are a national concern: in 2009 the cabinet held a meeting underwater, in diving gear, to draw the world's attention to it. Sri Lanka and India, the nearest neighbours, have collections of their own.