Martinique Emoji

🇲🇶 is not one picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇶, Martinique's country code MQ. Each phone or app decides what flag to draw for that pair, and for Martinique they have not agreed. Over the years the same 🇲🇶 has appeared with different artwork, most often the old snake flag; Apple, Google and Samsung have since switched to a newer Martinican flag, while some platforms still draw the snake flag. That is why people search for the "Martinique flag emoji change". Windows has no flag pictures and shows the letters MQ; recipients see a flag only if their platform renders the MQ regional-indicator pair as one.

The snake flag, a white cross on blue with a white snake in each corner, goes back to a royal ordinance of 1766 that gave it to the ships of the colony of Martinique and Saint Lucia. It was never adopted by the people of Martinique, and many see it as an emblem of the colonial and slave-trading past, so finding it on their phones was unwelcome. In February 2023 the Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique adopted its own flag: red, green and black, the colours that Martinicans had long flown at rallies, concerts and football matches. As part of France, Martinique still has the tricolour as its national flag, and the two are flown side by side.

If you want the colours whatever the phone draws, paste them as hearts: ❤️💚🖤. Many people also add the département number 972, which begins every Martinique postcode, or the island's names Matinik (in Creole) and Madinina. 🇪🇺 belongs here too: Martinique is one of the EU's outermost regions, inside the European Union and paying in euros.

Martinique symbols and what each emoji means

🌺 Madinina is an old poetic name for Martinique, usually glossed as "island of flowers" (its Indigenous origin is not certain), and flowers are its favourite emblem: hibiscus, anthuriums, porcelain roses (torch ginger) and the gardens of Balata above Fort-de-France. There is no hummingbird emoji, though the colibri is everywhere in the island's art, so people send 🐦 or 🌺 for it.

🌋 Montagne Pelée, about 1,400 m high, rules the north of the island. On 8 May 1902 its eruption destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre, then the island's cultural and economic capital and its liveliest city, and killed almost everyone in it, around 28,000 people; one of the very few survivors was a prisoner, Ludger Sylbaris, protected by the thick walls of his cell. The ruins 🏚️ still stand among the rebuilt town, and since 2023 the volcanoes and forests of Mount Pelée and the pitons of northern Martinique have been a UNESCO World Heritage site.

🐍 is the fer-de-lance, a venomous pit viper found in Martinique and nowhere else, which hikers on the forest trails are warned about; it is also the snake people mean when they talk about the old flag. 🪨💎 is the Rocher du Diamant, Diamond Rock, the islet off the south coast that the British Navy held in 1804 and 1805 and registered as a ship, HMS Diamond Rock. And 🥃 is rum: Martinique makes rhum agricole from fresh sugarcane juice, and since 1996 it has been the only rum with a French AOC, an appellation of origin like those of French wines.

Bèlè, zouk and carnival

🪘 Bèlè is the drum dance of Martinique: a drummer sits astride the tanbou bèlè, a singer leads, the chorus answers and couples dance in the yard, a tradition kept alive by the island's bèlè schools and evening gatherings. 🎶💃🕺 is zouk, the dance music of the French Antilles that Kassav' made famous in the 1980s; its singer Jocelyne Béroard is Martinican. Older still are the biguine of Saint-Pierre and chouval bwa, "wooden horse", the music once played to drive the village merry-go-rounds 🎠.

Carnival 🎭 builds up every Sunday from January and explodes in the four days before Lent. On Lundi Gras there are burlesque weddings 👰, with men in wedding dresses and women in suits; on Mardi Gras the streets fill with red devils 😈🔥; on Ash Wednesday everyone wears black and white 🖤🤍, and at night Vaval, the king of carnival, is burned in Fort-de-France.

December is the season of chanté Nwèl, neighbourhood evenings of Christmas carols 🎄🎶 with ham, pigeon peas 🫘 and shrubb 🍊, rum steeped with orange peel. On the night of Toussaint, 1 November, families light candles 🕯️ on the graves.

Martinique food and drink emoji

The apéritif is a ti-punch 🥃🍋‍🟩, white rhum agricole with a slice of lime and cane sugar, each person mixing their own; a planteur 🍹 is rum with fruit juice and spice. With it come accras 🐟, fritters of salt cod, and féroce d'avocat 🥑🌶️, avocado crushed with salt cod, cassava flour and hot pepper. Fish 🐟 is cooked in a lime and pepper blaff, octopus 🐙 becomes chatrou, and conch 🐚 is lambi, the shell that was once blown as a horn. 🦞 is the spiny lobster of the fishing villages, 🍛 colombo, the curry that came with workers from India in the 19th century, and 🍚🫘 rice with red beans.

At Easter and Pentecost families go to the beach and cook crab in matoutou, crab with rice 🦀🍚. Pâté en pot 🍲, a thick soup of lamb offal and vegetables, is served at weddings and christenings. Fruit means bananas 🍌, pineapple 🍍, mango 🥭 and coconut 🥥, and the sweet of the beach is sorbet coco 🍨, turned by hand in a wooden churn. Chocolat 🍫, thick spiced hot chocolate, is the drink of first communions and weddings, and coffee ☕ has a special story here: in the 1720s the French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu brought a young coffee plant to Martinique, and it became one of the ancestors of coffee across the Americas.

Freedom, writers and the sea

⛓️‍💥 22 May is Martinique's day of the abolition of slavery. France's abolition decree, prepared by Victor Schœlcher, was signed in Paris in April 1848, but before the news arrived the enslaved people of Saint-Pierre rose up on 22 May, and the governor proclaimed abolition the next day. 22 May is a public holiday, and ✊ is the emoji people send with it. Schœlcher's name, with its œ, is everywhere: a town next to Fort-de-France and the Bibliothèque Schœlcher 📚, an iron-and-glass library first built in Paris for the 1889 World's Fair, then taken apart and shipped to Fort-de-France.

Martinique has given the French language some of its great writers: the poet Aimé Césaire, a founder of the Négritude movement and mayor of Fort-de-France for more than fifty years, after whom the airport ✈️ is named, the psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon, and the novelists of créolité such as Patrick Chamoiseau, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for Texaco. Above Fort-de-France stands the white church of Sacré-Cœur de Balata ⛪, a smaller copy of the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre.

The sea is the island's playground: white sand at Les Salines 🏖️, turtles 🐢 grazing in the bays of Les Anses-d'Arlet, reefs 🪸🐠, dolphins and whales 🐬🐋 offshore, and fishermen in painted gommiers 🛶. Every summer the Tour des Yoles Rondes ⛵🏁 sails around the island: the yole is a narrow sailing boat without a keel, kept upright by crew members leaning out on long wooden poles, and its building and racing were added to UNESCO's register of good safeguarding practices in 2020. Football ⚽ is followed with passion, and Martinique's own team plays in the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

French and Creole letters and the euro sign

French is the official language of Martinique and the one everyone writes at school and work; it needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü, plus the rare æ and ÿ, and our French collection explains each one. Most Martinicans also speak Martinican Creole, kréyòl matinitjé, written much more phonetically than French: Matinik, bonjou (hello), mèsi anpil (thank you very much), lanmè (the sea), sa ou fè? (how are you?). Its spelling uses é, è and ò, the open o of kréyòl.

On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys, and ò is AltGr+7 and then o. On Windows with any keyboard hold Alt and type 0242 for ò, 0210 for Ò, 0232 for è, 0233 for é, 0231 for ç and 0156 for œ; on a Mac press Option+` and then o for ò, Option+E then e for é, Option+C for ç and Option+Q for œ; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The guillemets « » are the quotation marks, with a space inside.

Martinique pays in euros €, written after the number with a space as in France: 12,50 €. On Windows it is Alt+0128 or AltGr+E. Its sister island Guadeloupe 🇬🇵 shares the euro, the zouk and a very close Creole, French Guiana 🇬🇫 is the other French overseas region of the Americas, and Saint Lucia 🇱🇨 to the south and Dominica 🇩🇲 to the north can be seen from Martinique's coasts on a clear day. See our France, Guadeloupe and French Guiana collections for more.