Mauritania Emoji & Symbols

🇲🇷 the Mauritanian flag is an emoji Mauritanians often send: for pride, a match of the national team, 28 November, or simply to say where you are from. It is green with a gold crescent and star, between a red stripe at the top and one at the bottom. Green is read as Islam and hope, gold as the sands of the Sahara, and the red stripes as a tribute to the martyrs who defended the country. People also write the flag in hearts, ❤️💚💛, or with ☪️, the star and crescent; 🌙⭐ spell out the crescent and star separately.

Like every country flag, the Mauritania flag emoji is not one picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇷, the country code MR, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC you see the letters MR; copy it anyway, the person on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_mr:.

Mauritania old flag emoji and the new flag of 2017

Until 2017 the flag of Mauritania was plain green with the gold crescent and star; it was adopted in 1959, the year before independence from France. In a referendum on 5 August 2017 the constitution was changed and the two red stripes were added in honour of those who gave their lives for the country, and the new flag was raised for Independence Day that November. That is why people search "mauritania flag change" and "mauritania flag old and new".

There is no separate emoji for the old flag: 🇲🇷 is one emoji, and current emoji sets draw it with the red stripes. A phone or app whose emoji font is older than the change may still show the plain green version. To write the old flag on purpose, people use 💚🌙⭐ or 💚☪️.

Mauritania's neighbours have their own collections: Senegal 🇸🇳 across the Senegal River in the south, Mali 🇲🇱 to the east and south-east, Algeria 🇩🇿 at the short north-eastern border, and Western Sahara 🇪🇭 to the north, with Morocco beyond it. All the others are in Flag Emoji.

Desert, camel and tea emoji: life in the Sahara

Most of Mauritania is Sahara 🏜️: dunes, stony plateaus, hot sun ☀️, sand-laden wind 🌬️, and night skies 🌌 so clear that travellers come for the stars. The camel 🐪 is the animal of the country, for milk, meat, racing and the caravans of the past; goats and sheep 🐐🐑 are kept everywhere, and the Fulani herders of the south are known for their cattle 🐄. The big tent ⛺, the khaima, is still where guests are welcomed, in the desert and in the courtyards of Nouakchott alike. Fennec foxes 🦊, lizards 🦎 and scorpions 🦂 live in the sand.

👁️ is the emoji people use for the Richat Structure, the Eye of the Sahara: a ring of rock about 40 km across in the Adrar near Ouadane, so clear from orbit that astronauts know it as a landmark. The Adrar plateaus ⛰️ also hold the oases 🌴 around Atar, where families gather for the guetna, the summer date harvest.

No visit happens without atay, the tea 🫖🍵: strong green tea with mint 🌿 and plenty of sugar 🍬, brewed slowly over coals 🔥 and poured from high up, glass to glass, until it foams. It comes in three rounds, and a well-known saying across the Sahara has it that the first glass is bitter like life, the second sweet like love and the third gentle like death. Women wear the melhfa, a long, bright wrapped veil 🧕, and men the wide blue or white daraa robe, often with a turban against the sand 👳.

Ocean, fish and the iron ore train: Mauritania emoji of the coast

The Atlantic 🌊🏖️ runs the whole length of the country, from Nouadhibou in the north to the mouth of the Senegal River, and its waters are among the richest fishing grounds in the world. On the fishing beach of Nouakchott hundreds of brightly painted wooden pirogues 🛶 are pushed out through the surf and hauled back up the sand at the end of the day, when the fish market fills. 🐟🎣 are the catch, and 🐙 the octopus of Nouadhibou, one of the country's most valuable exports.

Between the two cities lies the Banc d'Arguin National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1989: shallow water, sandbanks and islands where millions of migrating shorebirds spend the winter, flamingos 🦩 and pelicans among them 🐦. The Imraguen fishermen of its villages are famous for fishing together with dolphins 🐬, which drive the shoals of mullet towards their nets.

🚂🚃🛤️ is the iron ore train, run by the national mining company SNIM from the mines of Zouérat ⛏️ across the desert to the port of Nouadhibou, a line of about 700 km. Its trains can be up to about 2.5 km long, among the longest and heaviest in the world; SNIM reserves the ore wagons for freight, while passengers use dedicated cars managed by SOMASERT.

Mauritanian food, music, faith and holidays

There is no emoji for Mauritania's dishes, so people build them. 🍚🐟 is thieboudienne, rice cooked with fish and vegetables, shared with Senegal and eaten all along the coast and the river; 🍲🥘 stand for couscous, which UNESCO inscribed in 2020 as the shared heritage of Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, and for the stews of the table. 🍖 is the méchoui, a whole roasted lamb for guests and feasts, and camel meat; 🥛 camel milk and zrig, milk thinned with water and sugar; 🫓🌾 bread and the millet of the south.

Mauritania is called the land of a million poets ✍️, and poetry in Hassaniya and classical Arabic is still recited at gatherings and on television. The old caravan towns of Chinguetti, Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata, World Heritage Sites since 1996, keep family libraries of centuries-old manuscripts 📜📚. Traditional music belongs to families of griots, the iggawen: the women play the ardin, a harp 🪉, the men the tidinit, a lute for which 🪕 is the nearest emoji, with the tbal drum 🥁 and song 🎶. Dimi Mint Abba and, today, Noura Mint Seymali took this music to the world.

Mauritania is an Islamic Republic, and nearly everyone is Muslim. 🕌🤲📿 belong to prayer, 🌙🕌 to Ramadan Karim and Eid al-Fitr, 🕋 to the Hajj, and 🐏 to Eid al-Adha, Tabaski to Pulaar and Wolof speakers, when families sacrifice a sheep. 28 November is Independence Day, the anniversary of independence from France in 1960, with flags and fireworks 🎉🎆. In football ⚽ the national team, Al-Mourabitoune, reached its first Africa Cup of Nations in 2019 and won its first match there in January 2024, 1–0 against Algeria, which took it to the knockout stage for the first time.

Mauritania symbols: the ouguiya (UM, أوقية) and how to type Arabic, Pulaar and Wolof

The Mauritanian ouguiya (code MRU) has no currency sign of its own in Unicode. Prices are written UM, as in 500 UM, or in Arabic أوقية; for money talk people use 🪙 💰 💵. One ouguiya is divided into 5 khoums, not 100. In 2018 the currency was redenominated, 10 old ouguiyas (MRO) becoming 1 new one (MRU), so older price tags have an extra zero.

Arabic is the official language, and Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof are national languages. Most people speak Hassaniya, the Arabic of the western Sahara, which CLDR estimates is spoken by about 3.8 million of Mauritania's roughly 5.2 million people in 2024; French, long the language of administration and still common in business and education, by about 560,000; Pulaar, the Fula of the Senegal River valley, by about 250,000; and Wolof by about 10,000 by the same estimates. Arabic has 28 letters written right to left (ا ب ت ث … ي), plus the hamza ء and its seats أ إ آ ؤ ئ and the endings ة ى, with its own comma ، question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛. Mauritania in Arabic is موريتانيا, Nouakchott نواكشوط, Chinguetti شنقيط.

Pulaar is written in Latin letters with five extras: the implosive consonants ɓ ɗ ƴ, said with a gulp of air drawn in, and the nasals ñ (as in Spanish) and ŋ (the ng of sing). Wolof shares ñ and ŋ and adds the vowels à é ë ó. On Windows, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language, or in Word type a code and press Alt + X: 0253 gives ɓ, 0257 ɗ, 01B4 ƴ, 014B ŋ (capitals 0181 Ɓ, 018A Ɗ, 01B3 Ƴ, 014A Ŋ). On a phone, add an Arabic keyboard, or a Fula or Wolof one if your keyboard app offers it; or copy the letters from this page. For full alphabets see our Hassaniyya, Arabic, French, Fula and Wolof collections.