Nauru Emoji & Symbols

The Nauru flag emoji 🇳🇷 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, N and R (Nauru's ISO country code, also behind the .nr web domain), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Country flags like this one became standard emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters NR instead; the text underneath is unchanged, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The Nauru flag was raised on independence day, 31 January 1968, and it is a small map. The dark blue field is the Pacific Ocean, the thin yellow stripe across the middle is the equator, and the white star sits just below it on the hoist side, because Nauru lies only about 60 km south of the equator. The star has twelve points, one for each of the twelve traditional Nauruan tribes. There is no emoji of that exact star, so people use the text star ✹ (Twelve Pointed Black Star) or the flag colours as hearts, 💙💛🤍, when they want the flag in another form.

Nauru national symbols: the coat of arms, the frigatebird and God's Will First

The coat of arms of Nauru 🛡️ carries the island's name in its own language, Naoero, and the motto God's Will First. The shield shows a cross on a woven mat representing the cross on Mount Calvary, a frigatebird on a perch, and a branch of tomano flowers; the twelve-pointed star centered above the shield represents Nauru's twelve tribes. Unicode has no frigatebird, so 🐦🪶🪽 stand in for the national bird, the great seabird with long, narrow wings that hangs over the reef.

Most Nauruans are Christian, mainly Protestant (the Nauru Congregational Church) and Catholic, so ✝️🙏⛪ are part of everyday posts, Sunday services and prayers for family. The national anthem is Nauru Bwiema, "Nauru, our homeland", and Nauru has no officially designated capital: the parliament and government offices stand in Yaren district, one of the island's fourteen districts.

Phosphate island: the Topside, the reef and the noddy birds

Nauru is a raised coral island of about 21 km², the smallest republic in the world and the third-smallest country after Vatican City and Monaco. A single road 🛣️ of about 19 km runs around the coast, and scooters 🛵 and cars share it with everyone. Under the island's interior, the Topside, lay one of the richest deposits of phosphate rock 🪨 ever found, identified in 1900 from a lump of Nauru rock that had been used as a doorstop in a Sydney office. Mining ⛏️ began in 1906 and was later run by the British Phosphate Commissioners; the rock was carried out to ships 🚢 moored off the reef by tall steel cantilevers 🏗️, which still stand on the coast.

A century of digging stripped about four fifths of the island down to a maze of grey coral pinnacles, and almost everyone lives on the narrow green coastal strip around it, between the pinnacles and the sea. 🌱 is the emoji of the long-promised rehabilitation of the Topside. The bright side of Nauru is the ring of reef 🪸 and white sand at Anibare Bay 🏖️, the inland Buada Lagoon ringed by palms 🌴, and the ocean that drops to deep water close to shore: 🐟🐠🦈🐬🐢 for fishing and diving 🤿, 🎣🛶 for the fishers. 🐦‍⬛ is the black noddy, the dark seabird that Nauruans traditionally catch with hand nets at dusk as the birds fly in to roost, a traditional pastime that is still practised today.

Footy, weightlifting and Nauru's sporting emoji

Nauru's national sport is Australian rules football, played by local clubs and followed closely through Australia's AFL. Unicode has no Australian rules ball, so fans use the oval 🏉 (officially a rugby ball), and 🏉🇳🇷 is the footy combo. Nauru takes pride in being one of the few countries outside Australia where Aussie rules is the main game.

The other sport Nauru is famous for is weightlifting 🏋️. Marcus Stephen won Commonwealth Games gold medals 🏅 for Nauru and later served as President of the country, and the island has sent lifters to the Olympics and Commonwealth Games ever since. For a nation of around 12,000 people, every medal 🏆 is celebrated by the whole island.

Independence Day, Angam Day and the emoji Nauruans send

Independence Day, 31 January, marks the end of the United Nations trusteeship run by Australia in 1968, with Hammer DeRoburt as the first president; feeds fill with 🇳🇷🎉, 🎆 and 💙💛🤍. Constitution Day, 17 May 📜, is the other national day, marking the Constitutional Convention's alterations to the Constitution on 17 May 1968.

Angam Day, 26 October, is unique to Nauru. Wars and epidemics had brought the Nauruan population close to vanishing, and 1,500 was held to be the number needed for the people to survive. The day remembers when the population climbed back to 1,500, first in 1932 with the birth of a baby 👶, and again in 1949, after the survivors of the Nauruans deported by the Japanese occupiers to Chuuk had come home 🏠 in 1946. 🇳🇷👶🎉 and 👪💙 are the Angam Day emoji. Christmas 🎄 and Easter are kept by the churches with singing 🎶 and big family meals.

Nauru currency symbol $, the Nauruan language and neighbours

Nauru uses the Australian dollar (AUD), 100 cents, so the Nauru currency symbol is the ordinary dollar sign $ and the cent sign ¢; write A$ or AUD when you need to tell it apart from other dollars. On a US keyboard layout, $ is Shift+4; Windows supports typing ¢ with Alt+0162, and 💵🪙 are the emoji for money.

The national language is Nauruan, a Micronesian language spoken at home by most Nauruans; English is used in government, schools and business, and CLDR estimates list around 9,400 English speakers; the 2021 census counted 11,680 people. Nauruan is written in the Latin script, but it lacks a standardized orthography; some spellings use vowel letters with tildes, including ã, õ and ũ. Naoero and Ekamawir omo use plain Latin letters without those marks. For neighbours, see the Australia 🇦🇺 page: Nauru uses the Australian dollar, and Brisbane is Nauru's main air link ✈️. See also Kiribati 🇰🇮, whose island of Banaba, the nearest land to Nauru, was mined for phosphate in the same way; the Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu collections cover the rest of the region.