Micronesia Emoji & Symbols

The Micronesia flag emoji 🇫🇲 is the flag of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). In Unicode it is not a single picture but two regional indicator letters, F and M, 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 FM instead, but the text is the same and still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag, adopted in 1978, is a light blue field for the Pacific Ocean with four white five-pointed stars set in a diamond, one for each state: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. That is why people paste it as 🇫🇲⭐⭐⭐⭐, or as 🩵🤍 (or 💙🤍) when they want the colours as hearts. The design grew out of the flag of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which had six white stars on blue; the four-star flag was adopted in 1978 after the Northern Marianas chose commonwealth status and Palau and the Marshall Islands rejected the proposed FSM constitution. Kosrae became a separate district in 1977 and one of the FSM's states in 1979. The national motto, Peace, Unity, Liberty, is the 🕊️ of the set, and 📜 stands for the constitution of 1979.

Do not confuse the country with Micronesia the region, the thousands of small islands of the western Pacific that also include Guam 🇬🇺, Palau 🇵🇼, the Marshall Islands 🇲🇭, the Northern Mariana Islands 🇲🇵, Kiribati 🇰🇮 and Nauru 🇳🇷, each with its own collection here. Only 🇫🇲 is the Federated States of Micronesia.

Micronesia symbols, state by state: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae

Yap, in the west, is famous for its stone money (rai): great limestone discs with a hole in the middle, the largest taller than a person, quarried on Palau and brought home by canoe and raft at real risk. A stone's value comes from its size and its story, and ownership can pass from family to family while the stone itself stays where it stands, often in a village "stone money bank" lining a path. 🪨 is the nearest emoji, and 🪨🪙 is how people write it. Yap Day, on 1 March, celebrates traditional dance and culture 💃🕺.

Chuuk, formerly Truk, is a ring of reef around a great lagoon dotted with high islands. It was a major base of the Japanese navy in the Second World War, and in February 1944 American carrier aircraft sank dozens of ships and aircraft there in Operation Hailstone. Today Chuuk Lagoon is one of the world's best-known wreck dives: ships such as the Fujikawa Maru lie in clear water, grown over with coral, some still holding trucks and aircraft. 🚢⚓✈️🤿 is the diver's combo.

Pohnpei, formerly Ponape, is the largest island and home of the capital, Palikir. It is a green, mountainous island and one of the rainiest places on Earth, so ⛰️🌧️🌈 suit it well. Off its eastern shore lies Nan Madol, a ruined city of stacked basalt columns built on nearly a hundred artificial islets in a lagoon, once the seat of the Saudeleur rulers and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016; 🪨🌊 is as close as emoji get. Kosrae, the easternmost state, is a single high island whose mountain ridge looks like a woman lying on her back, the Sleeping Lady; it also has the basalt ruins of Lelu and its own green-skinned tangerines 🍊.

Reefs, voyaging canoes and island life

The FSM is more than 600 islands spread across about 2,700 km of ocean from west to east, and most of them are low coral atolls 🏝️🌴🥥. The reefs and lagoons hold sea turtles 🐢, reef sharks 🦈, dolphins 🐬, octopus 🐙, mangrove crabs 🦀 and corals 🪸, and Yap is known for the manta rays that divers come to see; there is no ray emoji, so 🐟 and 🤿 stand in. 🎣 and 🌊 are everyday life, because fish is the heart of the diet.

The outer islands kept alive the art of sailing without instruments. Mau Piailug, a master navigator from Satawal in Yap State, guided the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 by stars, swells and birds, and revived wayfinding across the Pacific; 🛶⛵🌌 is that story in three emoji. 🛖 stands for thatched community houses such as the meeting houses of Yap, 🧺 for mats and baskets woven from pandanus and coconut leaves, 🌺🌼 for the flower garlands worn on heads and necks for celebrations, and 🩴 for the rubber flip-flops everyone wears. Most Micronesians are Christian, Catholic or Protestant, and church and choir are central to village life: ⛪✝️🙏.

Micronesian food, sport and the Micronesian Games

Unicode has no breadfruit or taro, the old staples of the islands, so 🍠 stands in for them and for the giant yams Pohnpei grows for feasts, with 🍌, 🥥 and 🐖 for the pig of a big celebration. 🍚 and 🐟 are the daily plate, and 🍣 is sushi; sashimi is eaten fresh with soy sauce, a habit from the Japanese years. 🥫 covers the canned meat and fish sold in every island store, 🍊 the Kosrae tangerine and 🥭 the mango season.

Basketball 🏀 and volleyball 🏐 are played on courts in many villages, and baseball ⚾ has a following from both the Japanese and American eras. The four states compete as separate teams in the Micronesian Games, a multi-sport event of the region's islands that Yap hosted in 2018, so 🏅🏆 posts often carry a state name, not just 🇫🇲. The FSM has sent athletes to every Summer Olympics since Sydney 2000, usually in athletics 🏃, swimming 🏊 and weightlifting 🏋️.

Independence Day, Constitution Day and the emoji people send

The FSM's constitution took effect on 10 May 1979, now Constitution Day, and on 3 November 1986 the Compact of Free Association with the United States came into force, ending the Trust Territory years; 3 November is celebrated as FSM Independence Day with parades, sports and dancing, and feeds fill with 🇫🇲🎉 and 🇫🇲🎆. Christmas 🎄 is one of the biggest seasons of the year, with church choirs and family gatherings, and each state also keeps its own days, such as Yap Day on 1 March.

Under the Compact, the United States 🇺🇸 is responsible for defence and FSM citizens can live and work in the US without a visa, so large Micronesian communities live in Guam, Hawaii and on the US mainland. 🇫🇲🇺🇸 and 🇫🇲❤️🏝️ in a bio say where someone is from and where they live now. The country keeps two time zones: Yap and Chuuk are on UTC+10, Pohnpei and Kosrae on UTC+11.

The US dollar, English and the island languages

Micronesia uses the US dollar, written $ with ¢ for cents, with 💵 and 🪙 as the emoji; Yap's stone money is still used for ceremonial exchanges, but not to buy groceries. English is the official language of government and schools, spoken by an estimated 57,000 of the country's roughly 100,000 people (CLDR estimates), and our English collection covers its characters.

At home most people speak one of the island languages: Chuukese, the largest, Pohnpeian, Kosraean and Yapese, plus outer-island languages such as Ulithian, Woleaian and Mortlockese, and the Polynesian languages Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro. They are written in the Latin alphabet, mostly with plain A–Z letters and letter pairs; Pohnpeian, for example, writes long vowels with a following h, as in Kaselehlie (hello), and has consonants written mw and pw. So the greetings people paste, such as Kaselehlie! 🌺 or the thank-yous Kinisou (Chuukese) and Kalahngan (Pohnpeian), need nothing beyond an ordinary keyboard.