Marshall Islands Emoji & Symbols

The Marshall Islands flag emoji 🇲🇭 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, M and H (the country's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags, this one among them, became emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters MH instead, but the text is the same and still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. On a phone keyboard, search "Marshall" in the emoji panel.

The flag was adopted on 1 May 1979, the day the Marshall Islands' constitution came into force. The blue field is the Pacific Ocean. Two stripes, orange above white, rise from the lower corner by the pole and widen toward the far edge: they stand for the country's two island chains, orange for Ralik ("sunset") and courage, white for Ratak ("sunrise") and peace, and their rising angle for growth. In the corner is a white star with 24 points, one for each municipality, and its four longer rays form a cross ✝️ for the islands' Christian faith. As hearts the flag becomes 💙🧡🤍, and ⭐ and 🌅 are the usual stand-ins for the star and the two chains.

Marshall Islands symbols: atolls, canoes and stick charts

The country is 29 coral atolls and 5 single islands, more than a thousand islets in all, spread across about two million square kilometres of ocean north of the equator. An atoll is a ring of narrow sandy islets around a lagoon, so 🏝️🌴🥥🌊 is the whole landscape in four characters; the capital, Majuro, is one such ring, and Kwajalein has one of the largest lagoons in the world. 🌈 has its own place: the Marshallese greeting iọkwe (also written iakwe or yokwe), which means hello, love and goodbye at once, is often explained as "you are a rainbow".

Marshallese navigators were famous across the Pacific for stick charts, frames of coconut-leaf ribs tied together, with small shells for the islands, that showed how ocean swells bend around atolls. They were studied on land and the waves were then read at sea by feel, so 🗺️🧭🌊 is the closest emoji to them. The outrigger canoe ⛵🛶 is still built and raced, from small paddling canoes to the big ocean-going walap, and the Majuro programme Waan Aelõñ in Majel ("canoes of the Marshall Islands") teaches young people to build and sail them. Today the islands' name also flies on ships 🚢⚓: the Marshall Islands run one of the largest ship registries in the world, which is why so many tankers and container ships carry its flag.

Bikini, Enewetak and 1 March: the emoji of remembrance

From 1946 to 1958 the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls. The largest, Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954, spread fallout over inhabited atolls such as Rongelap and Utrik, and the people of Bikini, moved away before the first tests, still cannot live safely on their home atoll. 1 March is Nuclear Victims and Survivors Remembrance Day, a national holiday, and posts on the day use 🇲🇭🕯️🕊️ rather than ☢️, which people keep for talking about the tests themselves. Bikini Atoll became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010.

Two everyday things carry Marshall Islands names. The bikini 👙 was named by the French designer Louis Réard in July 1946, days after the first atomic test at Bikini made the atoll world news. And on Kwajalein, home of the US Army's Reagan Test Site for missiles, SpaceX launched its Falcon 1 from little Omelek Island 🚀, and in September 2008 it became the first privately developed liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.

Home, church and holidays: the emoji people send

Life in the islands turns around the extended family 👪 and the church ⛪🙏, and island crafts are woven by hand from pandanus and coconut leaves, often trimmed with shells: baskets 🧺, mats, fans 🪭 and flower wreaths 🌼🌺 worn on the head for celebrations. Dance and song 💃🕺🎶 are part of every big occasion. The biggest family party is the kemem, a child's first birthday, when relatives and neighbours come for a feast with music and speeches, so 🎂🎉👪 means more here than an ordinary birthday. Food is fish 🐟, rice 🍚, coconut 🥥, breadfruit and pandanus; Unicode has no breadfruit or pandanus, so 🍠 has to stand in.

Constitution Day on 1 May is the national day, sent as 🇲🇭🎉📜. Other public holidays include Fishermen's Day in July, with fishing tournaments 🎣🐟; Manit Day (Culture Day) in late September, with canoe races, weaving and traditional food; Gospel Day in early December, marking the arrival of Christian missionaries ✝️; and Christmas 🎄, when churches hold long celebrations of singing and dancing.

Reefs, sharks and a country on the front line of climate change

Coral reefs 🪸 ring every atoll, full of 🐠🐟🐙 and sea turtles 🐢, and the World War II wrecks in the lagoons of Bikini and Kwajalein draw divers 🤿. In 2011 the Marshall Islands declared its whole ocean area a shark sanctuary 🦈, at the time the largest in the world, banning commercial shark fishing.

Most of the country's land lies only about two metres above the sea, so rising seas, king tides and drought are everyday concerns, and 🌊🌏🌡️ is how Marshallese posts talk about them. The islands have an outsized voice on the subject: foreign minister Tony de Brum helped build the coalition that pushed for the 1.5 °C goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner read her poem to her baby daughter, "Dear Matafele Peinam", at the opening of the UN Climate Summit in 2014. In sport, basketball 🏀, volleyball 🏐 and softball 🥎 are the big games, and Marshallese athletes have competed in athletics 🏃 and swimming 🏊 at the Summer Olympics since 2008.

Marshallese letters ā ļ m̧ ņ n̄ o̧ ō ū and the US dollar $

The Marshall Islands' official languages are Marshallese (Kajin M̧ajeļ) and English; the 2021 census counted 42,418 people in the country, and large Marshallese communities also live in Hawaii and in Springdale, Arkansas. The standard Marshallese alphabet has 24 letters: a ā b d e i j k l ļ m m̧ n ņ n̄ o o̧ ō p r t u ū w. The macron marks different vowels (ā, ō, ū) and the velar n̄ (the ng of "sing"), and the cedilla marks the "heavy" consonants ļ, m̧ and ņ and the vowel o̧. Unicode has single characters for Ā ā Ō ō Ū ū and Ļ ļ Ņ ņ (the last four shared with Latvian), but not for M̧ m̧, N̄ n̄ or O̧ o̧: those are written as the plain letter followed by a combining mark, U+0327 combining cedilla ̧ or U+0304 combining macron ̄. Because some fonts draw these badly, many people type ṃ, ñ and ọ instead, or leave the marks off, which is why you see both Majel and M̧ajeļ, and Aelōñ beside aelōn̄.

To type them: copy from this page; on a phone, long-press a, o or u for ā ō ū; on Windows in Word, type the code (0327 or 0304) after the letter and press Alt+X; in HTML use ̧ for the cedilla, ̄ for the macron, or named entities like ļ and ū. Money is easy: the Marshall Islands use the US dollar, written $ and ¢, with 💵 and 🪙 as emoji. For the English side of the islands, see the English collection; the neighbours have their own pages too: Micronesia 🇫🇲, Kiribati 🇰🇮, Nauru 🇳🇷 and Guam 🇬🇺.