Mali Emoji & Symbols

The flag of Mali is a vertical tricolour of green, gold and red, with green at the hoist. It has been the flag since 1 March 1961. The first version, used by the short-lived Mali Federation with Senegal, had a black human figure, the kanaga, in the gold band; it was dropped after the federation broke up, partly because many Muslims objected to a human figure on the flag. The colours are the Pan-African ones and are usually read as green for the land and its fields, gold for purity and the country's mineral wealth, and red for the blood shed for independence.

The Mali flag emoji 🇲🇱 is not a stored picture: it is two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇱, spelling ML, Mali's ISO code, and phones draw the pair as the flag. Country flags became standard emoji in 2015. Windows' emoji font has no country flags, so on many Windows PCs 🇲🇱 shows as the letters ML while a phone shows the flag. Where flags fail, people write the colours instead: 💚💛❤️ in hearts, or 🟩🟨🟥, which is the flag itself in squares.

Neighbours are easy to confuse. Guinea 🇬🇳 uses the same three colours in the opposite order, red, gold, green. Senegal 🇸🇳 has exactly Mali's stripes plus a green star in the middle. Check the order or the star before you paste.

Mali symbols and meanings: Djenné, Timbuktu and the Mali Empire

The coat of arms shows the Great Mosque of Djenné 🕌 under a bird in flight, with a rising sun 🌅 and two bows and arrows 🏹, around the motto Un peuple, un but, une foi, one people, one goal, one faith. The Djenné mosque is the largest mud-brick building in the world; the present one was built in 1907, and every year the whole town turns out to replaster it with fresh mud in a festival called the crépissage.

The country takes its name from the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita, the hero of the Manding epic that griots still sing, often called the lion of Manden 🦁. Its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with so much gold that his stay in Cairo was remembered for generations: 👑🪙💰 is his combo. In Bambara, mali is also the word for hippopotamus 🦛.

Timbuktu was a centre of Islamic scholarship, and its families kept hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine and poetry 📜📚. In 2012 librarians smuggled many of them south to Bamako to keep them safe. Djenné, Timbuktu, the Cliff of Bandiagara in the Land of the Dogons 🪨, and the Tomb of Askia in Gao are Mali's four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Bamako's own name is usually explained as crocodile river 🐊.

How to type Bambara, Fulfulde, Songhay and N’Ko letters

Mali is home to an estimated 25 million people and many languages. Bambara (Bamanankan) was the mother tongue of 49.9% of Mali’s population in the 2022 census and is the everyday common language of Bamako and much of the country. French, used by an estimated 4 million, was the official language until the 2023 constitution made Mali's national languages official and kept French as a working language. Fulfulde, Soninke, Songhay, Tamasheq, Dogon languages and others follow; our Bambara, Maasina Fulfulde, Soninke, Koyraboro Senni, Tamashek and French collections cover each alphabet.

Bambara adds four letters to the Latin alphabet: ɛ and ɔ for open e and o, ɲ for the sound of Spanish ñ, and ŋ for the ng of sing, as in I ni sɔgɔma, good morning. Bambara is tonal, but tone marks are usually left out in everyday writing. Fulfulde adds the implosive ɓ and ɗ and the glottal ƴ; Songhay writes nasal vowels ã ẽ õ and uses š and ž for sh and zh. Tuareg Tamasheq has its own old script, Tifinagh, as well as a Latin spelling.

Many Manding speakers also write in N’Ko, a right-to-left alphabet created in 1949 by the Guinean scholar Solomana Kanté; its name ߒߞߏ means "I say" in all the Manding languages, and it entered Unicode in 2006. On Windows, type the code and press Alt+X in Word: 025B for ɛ, 0254 ɔ, 0272 ɲ, 014B ŋ, 0253 ɓ, 0257 ɗ, 01B4 ƴ. In HTML, ɛ is ɛ and ŋ is ŋ. For French, Alt+0233 gives é, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0231 ç, and on a Mac Option+E then E gives é; otherwise copy from the grid.

Malian music emoji: griots, kora and desert blues

Music is Mali's best-known export. The griots (jeliw in Bambara) are hereditary singers and historians who keep family histories and the Sundiata epic alive at weddings and naming ceremonies 🎤. Their instruments are the kora, a 21-string harp-lute 🪉, the ngoni lute, often named among the ancestors of the banjo 🪕, the balafon, and the djembe, the goblet drum of the Manding world 🪘🥁.

Names to drop with 🇲🇱🎶: kora master Toumani Diabaté, guitarist Ali Farka Touré, whose album Talking Timbuktu with Ry Cooder took Malian blues worldwide 🎸, singers Salif Keita and Oumou Sangaré, the duo Amadou & Mariam, Fatoumata Diawara, and the Tuareg desert-blues band Tinariwen 🎸🏜️. Every February the Festival sur le Niger fills the riverbank at Ségou with concerts 🌊🎶.

Malian food emoji: riz gras, tigadèguèna and tea in the grin

Lunch is often riz gras, rice cooked in a tomato and meat sauce, or rice with tigadèguèna, the peanut sauce known elsewhere as mafé 🍚🥜🍲. Tô, a stiff millet or sorghum porridge with a leaf or okra sauce, is the village staple 🥣; dégué, millet with sweet curdled milk, is the snack 🥣🥛; and the tiny grain fonio is a Sahel classic 🌾. From the Niger comes capitaine, the Nile perch, fried or grilled 🐟, and evenings bring brochettes and grilled chicken 🍢🍗. The Dogon grow shallots on their plateau 🧅, and shea butter, karité, is pressed from the nuts of wild trees 🧈.

To drink: red dabileni made from hibiscus 🌺, sharp gnamakoudji, ginger juice 🫚, and above all strong green tea with mint, brewed in three rounds in a small pot and poured from high for foam 🍵🫖. The circle of friends who meet every day over it is called a grin.

Holidays, sport and places in Mali emoji

Mali celebrates Independence Day on 22 September (1960) 🇲🇱🎉🎆 and remembers the 1991 uprising on 26 March, Martyrs' Day. Most Malians are Muslim, so Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) is the year's biggest feast 🐏🕌, with the end of Ramadan ☪️🙏 and the Maouloud, which brings crowds to Timbuktu; Christmas ⛪🎄 is a public holiday too. Greetings are long and warm, and sanankuya, the joking kinship between certain families and peoples, such as the Dogon and the Bozo, lets them tease each other freely 🤝😂.

The football team is Les Aigles, the Eagles 🦅⚽. They reached the Africa Cup of Nations final in 1972 and hosted the tournament in 2002, and Mali has produced stars like Salif Keïta, Frédéric Kanouté and Seydou Keita. Mali is also one of Africa's strongest basketball nations, above all its women's and youth teams 🏀.

Life follows the Niger River 🌊🛶, where Bozo fishers work from pirogues 🎣 and, in the yearly Dégal at Diafarabé, Fulani herders swim their cattle across the river 🐄. In the north is the Sahara 🏜️, where Tuareg men wear the indigo veil, the tagelmust 👳, and camel caravans still carry slabs of salt from Taoudenni 🐪🧂. The Gourma is home to Africa's northernmost elephants 🐘, and gold 🪙⛏️ is the country's main export. In Bamako, the green Sotrama minibuses 🚐 and Chinese motorbikes nicknamed Jakarta 🛵 fill the streets.