Mauritius Emoji

The Mauritius flag emoji 🇲🇺 shows the flag raised at independence on 12 March 1968: four equal horizontal stripes of red, blue, yellow and green. Red stands for the struggle for freedom and independence, blue for the Indian Ocean around the island, yellow for the light of independence shining over it, and green for its agriculture and the green of the island all year round. Mauritians copy the stripes in order as hearts, 🇲🇺❤️💙💛💚, in bios, on match days and every 12 March.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇲🇺 is not a picture in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 + 🇺, spelling the country code MU. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag, and WhatsApp shows it on every platform. Windows does not include country flag pictures in its own emoji font, so in some Windows apps the Mauritius flag emoji appears as the letters 'MU'; the people you send it to on iPhone or Android still see the flag.

The dodo 🦤 and the national symbols of Mauritius

The dodo emoji 🦤 belongs to Mauritius more than to anywhere else: the big flightless pigeon lived only here, and within a century of the first Dutch landing in 1598 it was gone, with the last widely accepted sighting in 1662. Today it is the island's mascot, on the coat of arms, on coins, in the name of shops and on souvenir T-shirts, so 🇲🇺🦤 is the shortest way to say Mauritius. The dodo emoji itself arrived in Unicode with Emoji 13.0 in 2020.

The coat of arms holds the dodo 🦤 on one side and a deer 🦌 on the other, each holding a stalk of sugarcane, around a shield with a ship, three palm trees 🌴, a key 🔑 and a star ⭐. They illustrate the motto Stella Clavisque Maris Indici, 'Star and Key of the Indian Ocean', so ⭐🔑 is a quiet way to write the country's own name for itself.

The dodo story has a happier sequel. The Mauritius kestrel, the pink pigeon 🕊️ and the echo parakeet 🦜 each fell to a handful of wild birds in the 20th century; in 1974 only four kestrels were known in the wild. Breeding and reserve programmes, on the mainland and on Île aux Aigrettes, brought all three back to hundreds. The endemic Mauritius fruit bat 🦇 still flies over the forests, alongside two newcomers brought by people: long-tailed macaques 🐒 and Javan deer 🦌. Aldabra giant tortoises 🐢 now graze where the island's own giant tortoises, extinct like the dodo, once lived.

Island emoji: lagoons, Le Morne, Chamarel and the sea

Mauritius is a volcanic island 🌋 ringed almost all the way round by a coral reef 🪸, so most of its coast is calm turquoise lagoon 🌊 with white beaches 🏖️ and casuarina and palm trees 🌴. Families spend Sundays on the public beaches, catamarans ⛵ and speedboats 🚤 run to Île aux Cerfs, divers and snorkellers 🤿 meet tropical fish 🐠, sea turtles 🐢 and shells 🐚, and on the west coast boats take people out to the dolphins 🐬 of Tamarin Bay and the sperm whales 🐋 offshore. Big-game fishing 🎣 for blue marlin starts beyond the reef.

In the southwest, Le Morne Brabant ⛰️ rises over the lagoon. Enslaved people who escaped hid on its cliffs, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for that history; below it are the island's best kitesurfing 🪁 spots, surfers 🏄 ride Tamarin's waves, and the sunsets 🌅 of the west coast fill phones every evening. Seen from the air, sand pouring off the reef shelf beside Le Morne looks like an underwater waterfall.

Inland, the Seven Coloured Earths of Chamarel are dunes of volcanic soil in bands of red, brown, violet, green, blue, purple and yellow, the island's own 🌈. Trou aux Cerfs in Curepipe is a dormant crater 🌋 with houses all round its rim, and Black River Gorges National Park 🌳 protects 6,574 hectares of forest, where hikers 🥾 also climb Le Pouce and Pieter Both. From November to April the island watches for cyclones 🌀, which come with numbered warning classes on the radio and in every group chat.

Dholl puri, rougaille and Mauritian food emoji

🫓🫘🌶️ is dholl puri, the island's favourite street food: thin flatbreads filled with ground yellow split peas, rolled around bean curry, rougaille, chutney and pickles, sold by the pair from stalls and vans. 🧆🌶️ is gato piment, little fried split-pea fritters with chilli, eaten hot in a bun or out of a paper bag. Farata, the flaky cousin of dholl puri, is the other 🫓.

🍛 covers the curries, the briani of weddings and the fish or octopus 🐙 vindaye cooked with mustard seed, turmeric and vinegar; 🍅 is rougaille, the tomato, onion, garlic, thyme and chilli sauce served with sausage, fish or salted fish. Sino-Mauritian cooking adds 🍜 mine frire (fried noodles), 🥟 boulettes (dumplings in broth) and 🍚🍳 bol renversé, rice turned out of a bowl with stir-fry and a fried egg on top.

Fruit sellers sell pineapple 🍍 cut into spirals with chilli salt 🌶️, green mango 🥭, coconut 🥥 and many kinds of banana 🍌. 🥤 is alouda, the sweet milk drink with basil seeds and jelly from Port Louis market, ☕ the vanilla-scented tea of Bois Chéri, 🍺 a cold Phoenix, the local beer, and 🥃 Mauritian rum, often steeped with vanilla, spices or fruit as rhum arrangé.

Sega, Diwali and Mauritian holiday emoji

🥁🪇💃🕺 is sega, the music born among enslaved Africans and Malagasy on the island: the ravanne 🥁, a big goatskin frame drum tightened over a fire, the maravanne 🪇, a box rattle full of seeds, and a triangle, with dancers in wide swirling skirts. UNESCO listed traditional Mauritian sega as intangible cultural heritage in 2014, and Kaya's seggae, sega mixed with reggae, carried it into modern music. 🎶🎤 under a video usually means sega, seggae or the Bhojpuri wedding songs, geet-gawai, that UNESCO listed in 2016.

Mauritius has public holidays from four traditions, and the emoji follow them. About half the people are Hindu: 🪔✨ for Diwali, 🕉️🔱 for Maha Shivaratri, when pilgrims dressed in white walk across the island carrying decorated arches to the sacred crater lake of Grand Bassin, where a giant statue of Shiva stands, 🦚 for Thaipoosam Cavadee, when Tamil devotees carry the cavadee arch decorated with peacock feathers to the temple 🛕, 🐘 for Ganesh Chaturthi and 🎨 for Holi. Muslims send 🌙☪️🕌 for Eid; Christians 🎄 for Christmas and ⛪✝️ for the pilgrimage to the shrine of Père Laval each September; Sino-Mauritians 🧧🏮🧨🐉 for the Spring Festival in Port Louis's Chinatown.

The national days carry the island's history. 12 March is Independence and Republic Day 🇲🇺🎆🎉, independence from Britain in 1968 and the republic in 1992. 1 February marks the abolition of slavery in 1835 ⛓️‍💥, and 2 November the arrival of indentured labourers: almost half a million came from India between 1834 and 1920 through the Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and their descendants are most of today's Mauritians 🇲🇺🇮🇳.

Mauritius rupee symbol ₨ and French letters: how to type them

The Mauritian rupee (code MUR) is divided into 100 cents and is written Rs in shops and prices: Rs 100, Rs 1,000. Unicode has a single rupee sign ₨ (U+20A8, HTML ₨), which you can copy here; in Word on Windows type 20A8 and press Alt+X. Do not use ₹, which is the Indian rupee.

The constitution names no countrywide official language. English is the language of parliament, laws and courts, French dominates the newspapers and much of business, and radio mixes Kreol, French and English, and Kreol Morisien (Morisyen) is what almost everyone speaks at home: CLDR estimates about 1.2 million Morisyen speakers in a population of about 1.3 million, with about 960,000 people using French and 940,000 English. Bhojpuri (about 110,000 by the same estimates), Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Marathi and Hakka Chinese are kept alive in homes, temples and mosques. Kreol has its own standard spelling from 2011, written in Latin letters without diacritics, and has been taught in schools since 2012: 'Mo kontan twa' is 'I love you', 'Ki manyer?' is 'How are you?'.

French needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û and the guillemets « », all on this page. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0232 for è, 0224 for à, 0231 for ç and 0171/0187 for « »; on a Mac, Option+E then E gives é, Option+` gives the grave accents, Option+I the circumflexes, Option+C gives ç and Option+\ gives «. On a phone, press and hold e, a, c or u to pick the accented letter. For the other languages of the island, see the Morisyen, French, English, Bhojpuri, Urdu and Tamil collections.