Mayotte Emoji

🇾🇹 is made of two regional indicator letters, 🇾 and 🇹, Mayotte's code YT. Your phone decides what to draw for the pair. Mayotte is a department and region of France, so its only official flag is the French tricolour 🇫🇷; many phones depict 🇾🇹 as the local white banner, while Windows shows YT, which is why people search for “Mayotte flag vs France”. A recipient sees it as a flag only on a platform that supports the Mayotte flag sequence.

The flag people wave on the island is a different one: a white flag with the name MAYOTTE in red above the island's coat of arms, a shield with a crescent moon and ylang-ylang flowers held by two seahorses, over the Shimaore motto Ra Hachiri, “we are vigilant”. The seahorses are there because the outline of Grande-Terre is said to look like one. The 🇾🇹 emoji usually depicts this local banner on supported platforms, so Mahorais add something that can only mean the island: 🇾🇹🌼, 🇾🇹🏝️, or 976, the department number that starts every postcode there and is used as a name for the island itself.

Mayotte sits in the northern Mozambique Channel between Madagascar 🇲🇬 and the African coast, and geographically it is one of the four Comoro Islands 🇰🇲. It became French in 1841; when the archipelago voted on independence in 1974, the other three islands chose it and Mayotte voted to stay with France, which the Comoros still contest. In 2011 it became France's 101st department, and since 2014 it has been one of the EU's outermost regions 🇪🇺, while Mayotte has had the euro as its currency since 1999. It is also the youngest department in France: about half its people are under 18.

Mayotte emoji and what they mean

🏝️🌴 is the island itself, or rather the islands: Grande-Terre, with the capital Mamoudzou, and little Petite-Terre, with Dzaoudzi and the airport ✈️, linked by la barge ⛴️, the ferry that crosses the lagoon all day. 🌊🪸 is that lagoon, one of the largest in the world, closed off by a barrier reef that in places runs double, a rarity. 🤿🐠 is snorkelling on it, and 🛶⛵ the outrigger pirogues of the fishermen and the sailing boats moored off Dzaoudzi.

🐢 is the emoji Mayotte is proudest of: at N'Gouja beach in the south green turtles graze on the seagrass a few metres from swimmers, and at night they come up to lay their eggs on beaches such as Saziley. From about July to October humpback whales 🐋🐳 come up from the Antarctic to give birth in the lagoon's passes, and dolphins 🐬 are seen all year. 🐒 stands for the maki, the brown lemur that lives in the island's forests and has become its mascot; Unicode has no lemur emoji. 🦇 is for the big fruit bats that fly over Mamoudzou at dusk, 🦎 for the chameleons.

⛰️ is Mont Bénara, at about 660 m the highest point, and the sharp cone of Mont Choungui in the south, the island's best-known silhouette. 🌋 is real here too: Petite-Terre holds the green crater lake of Dziani Dzaha, and in 2018 a swarm of earthquakes shook the island until scientists found the cause in 2019, a brand-new underwater volcano rising from the sea floor about 50 km to the east, since named Fani Maoré.

Ylang-ylang, salouva and msindzano

🌼 is ylang-ylang, the yellow, star-shaped flower whose essential oil goes into fine perfumes. Mayotte was once one of the world's main producers, and its nickname is still l'île aux parfums, the island of perfumes; small stills where the flowers are distilled can still be visited, and the flowers sit on the island's coat of arms. 🌺🌿 are the rest of the island's green: hibiscus, vanilla vines, spice gardens and the baobabs 🌳 that stand along the coast.

Mahoraise women wear the salouva, a long, brightly printed wrap dress, with a kishali shawl over the shoulders or head 🧕; on festive days whole groups dress in matching cloth. Many also wear msindzano, a pale yellow face mask made by grinding sandalwood on a block of coral with a little water, used as skin care and sun protection and sometimes painted in patterns. Neither has an emoji, so people write the words, and 🌼💛 does the rest.

Mataba, brochettes and mabawa: food emoji

🍚 comes with almost every meal. 🍲🥥 is mataba, cassava leaves pounded and simmered for a long time in coconut milk, the island's signature dish, usually served with rice or with boiled green bananas 🍌 and grilled fish 🐟. 🌶️ is pilipili, the hot chilli sauce on every table.

🍢🍗 is the roadside grill: in the evening, stalls along the roads of Mamoudzou and the villages grill brochettes and mabawa, chicken wings, over charcoal, sold with cassava or bananas and a spoon of pilipili. The lagoon gives octopus 🐙 and crab 🦀, and the fruit stalls follow the seasons: coconuts 🥥 all year, mangoes 🥭 in the hot, rainy season around the end of the year.

Faith, Ramadan and the manzaraka

Nearly everyone in Mayotte is a Sunni Muslim, and 🕌 is in every village. The mosque of Tsingoni, whose mihrab bears a date that corresponds to 1538, is often called the oldest mosque in France still in use. 🌙☪️ is Ramadan, when life moves to the evening and families gather to break the fast; 🤲📿 is prayer, and 🕋 the pilgrimage to Mecca. Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are the big feasts of the year, with new clothes, visits and food shared from house to house.

💍 is the manzaraka, Mayotte's grand wedding, for which families save for years: a procession, music, hundreds of guests in matching salouva and whole days of celebration. 🥁🪘🎶 are the drums that carry the dances, 💃 is the debaa, the sung dance of women, who sing religious songs in rows, dressed alike, with slow, precise movements of the hands and head, and 🕺 the men's dances to the drum. 🎤 is for the island's singers, who mix these rhythms with m'godro, reggae and afro-pop.

⛓️‍💥✊ is for 27 April, a public holiday in Mayotte that marks the abolition of slavery on the island in 1846, two years before it was abolished in the rest of France's colonies. 🎆 is for 14 July, France's national day. 🌀🙏 has been sent to Mayotte in hard times: on 14 December 2024 cyclone Chido, the strongest to hit the island in about ninety years, tore through it and destroyed whole neighbourhoods.

French, Shimaore and the euro sign: how to type them

French is the official language, and CLDR estimates that about 120,000 people in Mayotte speak it. At home, most people speak Shimaore, a Comorian language from the Bantu family and a close relative of Swahili (CLDR lists Comorian as the main language in Mayotte and Swahili separately for a small minority; see our Swahili collection), and in a number of villages Kibushi, a variety of Malagasy brought over from Madagascar. Both are usually written in plain Latin letters, and Comorian was long written in Arabic script. A few words to start with: Jéjé? (hello, how are you?), Marahaba (thank you), Karibu (welcome).

French needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü, plus the rare æ and ÿ, and the é turns up in the French spelling of island place names such as Dembéni, Bandrélé, Bouéni and Kani-Kéli. On a French AZERTY keyboard é, è, à, ç and ù have their own keys. On Windows with a numeric keypad, hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0201 for É, 0232 for è and 0231 for ç; on a Mac press Option+E then e for é, Option+E then Shift+E for É and Option+C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. The guillemets « » are the quotation marks, with a space inside.

Mayotte adopted the euro (€) as its currency in 1999; euro cash began circulating in 2002, as elsewhere in France. French amounts are written after the number: 12,50 €; on Windows it is Alt+0128 or AltGr+E. See our French collection for every French letter, and our Comoros, Réunion and Madagascar collections for the neighbours.