Namibia Emoji

🇳🇦 the Namibia flag emoji shows a red band edged in white running diagonally from the bottom left to the top right, with a blue triangle above it, a green triangle below, and a gold sun with twelve triangular rays in the blue corner. Like most national flag emoji, it is encoded as two regional indicator letters, 🇳 and 🇦, for Namibia's country code NA, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters NA instead; whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

The flag was first raised at independence on 21 March 1990. Officially the blue stands for the sky, the Atlantic Ocean, the sea's riches and the importance of rain and water; the red for Namibia's most important resource, its people, and their heroism and determination; the green for its plants and farmland; the white for peace and unity; and the gold sun for life and energy. Where flags don't show, people write the colours as hearts, 💙🤍❤️🤍💚, with a 💛 or ☀️ for the sun.

On the coat of arms the flag sits on a shield 🛡️ held up by two oryx (gemsbok), the national animal, with an African fish eagle 🦅, the national bird, above it and a welwitschia 🌿 growing on a sand dune below, over the motto Unity, Liberty, Justice. There is no oryx or antelope emoji, so 🦌 is the closest stand-in people use. The welwitschia grows only in the Namib Desert of Namibia and southern Angola: it has just two leaves, which keep growing from the base for its whole life, and the oldest plants are thought to be well over a thousand years old.

Namibia currency symbol: N$, the Namibian dollar

The Namibian dollar (ISO code NAD) was introduced in 1993 and is divided into 100 cents. Prices are written N$, as in N$100, or simply with $ when it is clear you are in Namibia; there is no separate Unicode sign, so you copy the ordinary dollar sign $ and put an N in front. It is pegged one to one to the South African rand, and the rand (written R, as in R100) is legal tender in Namibia too, so shops take both and change often comes back as a mix. In chats people add 💵, 🪙 or 💰.

Diamonds 💎 are the best known of Namibia's riches. The first were picked up in the sand near Lüderitz in 1908, which set off a rush and built the town of Kolmanskop, now a ghost town 🏚️ whose houses are filling up with sand. Today most Namibian diamonds come from the sea floor off the southern coast, brought up by mining ships 🚢. The country is also one of the world's large uranium producers ⛏️, and its beef 🐄🥩 is exported as far as Europe.

Namibian letters: the click letters ǃ ǁ ǀ ǂ, Afrikaans ê and German ß

English has been Namibia's only official language since independence, but few Namibians speak it at home. Namibia's 2023 census counted 3,022,401 people. CLDR's approximate literate populations—not total speaker counts—are 2,000,000 for Afrikaans, 920,000 for Kuanyama, 550,000 for Ndonga, 290,000 for Nama, 240,000 for Herero, 180,000 for English and 24,000 for German. The characters beyond A–Z that you meet in Namibian names and words come mostly from Khoekhoegowab, Afrikaans and German.

Khoekhoegowab has four click consonants, and its standard spelling writes them with four special letters: ǀ (dental click, a "tsk" made with the tongue tip behind the teeth), ǁ (lateral click, the sound used to gee up a horse), ǂ (palatal click) and ǃ (alveolar click, a sharp pop). They are real letters in Unicode, U+01C0 to U+01C3, not a vertical bar or an exclamation mark, and they appear in place names on every map: the ǁKharas Region in the south, and the ǃnara melon 🍈 of the Topnaar people of the Namib. Because no keyboard has them, newspapers and signs often write //Kharas or !nara instead. The circumflex marks nasal vowels: â, î, û.

Afrikaans uses ê, ô, û and î for long or open vowels (sê, "say"; môre, "tomorrow"; brûe, "bridges"), ë and ï to start a new syllable (geëet, "eaten"; reël, "rule"), é and è in a few words (dié, "this one"; hè, "eh?"), and ’n, the word for "a". Unicode has an old single character ʼn for it, but it is deprecated: write an apostrophe and n. German, spoken by a small community and seen on street signs, bakeries and the daily Allgemeine Zeitung, adds ä, ö, ü and ß.

To type them on Windows hold Alt and type 0234 for ê, 0244 for ô, 0251 for û, 0235 for ë, 0228 for ä, 0246 for ö, 0252 for ü or 0223 for ß. On a Mac press Option+I then the letter for a circumflex, Option+U then the letter for a diaeresis, and Option+S for ß. On a phone, long-press the plain letter. The click letters are easiest to copy from the grid above; in HTML they are ǀ ǀ, ǁ ǁ, ǂ ǂ and ǃ ǃ. Each language has its own collection too: Afrikaans, Nama, German, Kuanyama, Ndonga, Herero and English.

Sossusvlei, the Skeleton Coast and Etosha: Namibia's places in emoji

The Namib is often called the oldest desert in the world, dry for tens of millions of years, and its sand sea is a UNESCO World Heritage site. At Sossusvlei red dunes among the tallest on Earth glow at sunrise 🏜️🌅, and in nearby Deadvlei the black skeletons of camelthorn trees 🪾, dead for centuries, stand on a white clay pan. The desert lives on fog 🌫️ rolling in from the Atlantic: the fog-basking beetle 🪲 does a headstand on the dune crest and drinks the drops that run down its back. Near Aus, wild horses 🐎 roam the desert, and the NamibRand reserve is Africa's first International Dark Sky Reserve 🌌.

The Skeleton Coast 🌊 got its name from the whale bones and shipwrecks 🚢 along its shore, and its park gates carry a skull and crossbones ☠️. Further south, Cape Cross has one of the largest Cape fur seal colonies 🦭 in the world; Walvis Bay is known for its flamingos 🦩 and dolphins 🐬, and Lüderitz for African penguins 🐧, oysters 🦪 and crayfish 🦞. Between the towns, shore anglers 🎣 line the beaches for kob and steenbras 🐟. Swakopmund, with its German-era buildings, is the adventure town: sandboarding down the dunes 🏂, skydiving 🪂, and surfers 🏄 come for Skeleton Bay, one of the longest left-hand waves anywhere.

Etosha National Park 🏞️, proclaimed in 1907, is built around a huge white salt pan, and in the dry season elephants 🐘, rhinos 🦏, lions 🦁, giraffes 🦒 and zebras 🦓 line up at its waterholes. Namibia is often called the cheetah capital of the world; there is no cheetah emoji, so 🐆 does the job. In the northwest, desert-adapted elephants and rhinos live among the mountains of Kunene, and in the green northeast the Zambezi and Kavango rivers bring hippos 🦛 and crocodiles 🐊. Inland stand Spitzkoppe 🪨, the Brandberg ⛰️ with its rock paintings, Twyfelfontein's rock engravings, the Fish River Canyon, often called the largest canyon in Africa, and the Hoba meteorite ☄️, the largest known meteorite on Earth, which still lies where it fell near Grootfontein. Most visitors see it all in a 4x4 🚙 with a tent on the roof 🏕️; Namibians drive a bakkie 🛻.

Namibian food emoji: kapana, oshifima, omajowa and Windhoek Lager

Kapana is Windhoek's street food: strips of beef grilled over open fires 🍖🔥 at markets like the Single Quarters in Katutura, cut on the spot and dipped in spicy salt and relish. Meat is at the centre of most celebrations, from the weekend braai 🥩🔥 to a slow-cooked potjie 🍲 in a three-legged pot, and biltong, dried game or beef, is the road-trip snack. In the north the staple is oshifima 🥣, a stiff porridge of mahangu, pearl millet 🌾, eaten with the hands and a stew.

Some foods found in Namibia include: mopane worms 🐛, dried and fried; omajowa 🍄, giant mushrooms that push up from termite mounds after the summer rains and are sold along the roads near Okahandja; and the ǃnara melon 🍈 of the Namib. The coast adds oysters 🦪 from Walvis Bay and Lüderitz and crayfish 🦞.

German colonial times left a taste for Kaffee und Kuchen ☕🍰, pretzels 🥨 and bakeries in Windhoek and Swakopmund, and for beer: Windhoek Lager 🍺 is brewed to the old German purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, and Windhoek holds its own Oktoberfest 🍻 every year.

Sport, towns and holidays: Namibia emoji people send

Football ⚽ fans follow the Brave Warriors, who won their first ever Africa Cup of Nations match against Tunisia at the 2023 tournament. The rugby team 🏉, the Welwitschias, has played at every Rugby World Cup since 1999, and the cricket team 🏏 beat Sri Lanka in the opening match of the 2022 T20 World Cup and is a co-host of the 2027 Cricket World Cup with South Africa and Zimbabwe.

In athletics 🏃 Frankie Fredericks won four Olympic silver medals 🥈, in the 100 m and 200 m at Barcelona 1992 and Atlanta 1996, and Christine Mboma won silver in the 200 m in Tokyo. Harry Simon and Julius Indongo became world boxing champions 🥊, and the Desert Dash, a mountain-bike race 🚵 of about 370 km from Windhoek to Swakopmund, runs through the night every December.

In Windhoek 🏙️ the Christuskirche ⛪, finished in 1910, and three small hilltop castles 🏰 from German times look down on a modern capital. In the north, a traditional Owambo homestead 🛖 is a maze of huts and yards inside a wooden palisade, and women in the north weave baskets 🧺 from makalani palm leaves.

Independence Day, 21 March, is the big national day: 🇳🇦🎉🎆 with Happy Independence Day. Heroes' Day on 26 August remembers the start of the armed liberation struggle at Omugulugwombashe in 1966. Herero women's long, layered dresses 👗 and horn-shaped headdresses, which honour the cattle 🐄 at the heart of Herero life, are worn proudly at commemorations in Okahandja and at weddings. Christmas 🎄 falls in the hot, rainy summer and is a time for family, church ⛪ and braai, and when the rains 🌧️ come after a long dry season, everyone posts about it.