New Caledonia Emoji & Symbols

The New Caledonia flag emoji 🇳🇨 is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇳 + 🇨, the territory's code NC. Each platform decides what to draw for it, so check how it looks on your own phone. Windows shows the letters NC; recipients see a flag only on platforms that support it.

In 2010, New Caledonia's Congress made a non-binding request for the French tricolour 🇫🇷 💙🤍❤️ and the Kanak flag, created by the independence movement in the 1980s, to be flown side by side; each local authority decides whether to fly both. Its bands are blue for the sky and the ocean, red for the blood shed in the struggle and for unity, and green for the land and the ancestors; on the yellow sun sits a black flèche faîtière, the carved spire that crowns the roof of a Kanak great hut. There is no emoji for it, so people write it in hearts, 💙❤️💚💛, often next to 🇳🇨. Supporters of independence call the country Kanaky.

New Caledonia emoji and what they mean

🏝️🪸🐠 are the lagoon. A barrier reef encloses one of the largest lagoons in the world, and since 2008 the Lagoons of New Caledonia have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 🐢 sea turtles and 🦈 reef sharks live there, humpback whales 🐋🐳 come into the southern lagoon from July to September to give birth, and 🐍 is the tricot rayé, a black-and-white banded sea snake: venomous, but so docile that children are taught simply to leave it alone. The Aquarium des Lagons in Nouméa keeps living nautiluses, the shelled cousins of the octopus; 🐚 is the nearest emoji.

🌲 is the Isle of Pines, the Île des Pins, named by Captain Cook for its columnar pines, which stand like tall green pillars above white sand and turquoise water. Outrigger pirogues 🛶 with triangular sails still take visitors across the bay of Upi. 💚 is also the Heart of Voh, a heart-shaped clearing in the mangroves on the west coast made famous by Yann Arthus-Bertrand's aerial photograph on the cover of Earth from Above.

🐦 stands for the cagou (kagu), the national bird: grey, crested and almost flightless, found only in New Caledonia, with a call that sounds like a barking dog. 🦎 is for geckos: the giant gecko of New Caledonia is the largest living gecko, and the crested gecko, now a popular pet worldwide, was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in 1994. 🦇 is the flying fox, the roussette, and 🌺🌿 the flora: about three quarters of New Caledonia's plants grow nowhere else.

Kanak culture, food and the bush

🛖 is the case, the Kanak great hut, round and tall under its thatch, with a carved flèche faîtière 🪵 on top and carved posts at the door. The Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 1998, borrows its curved wooden shells from these huts and is named after Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak leader killed in 1989. The yam is at the heart of Kanak custom: it is planted, exchanged and offered with ceremony, and the new yam is celebrated each year before anyone eats it. There is no yam emoji, so people use 🫜 or 🍠. 🥁🎶🎸 is kaneka, the Kanak popular music born in the 1980s from traditional rhythms and reggae, and 💃🕺 the pilou dances.

The dish everyone names is bougna 🍲: yam, taro, sweet potato and banana 🍌 with chicken 🍗, fish or lobster 🦞, soaked in coconut milk 🥥, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked for hours on hot stones in an earth oven. The lagoon gives fish 🐟, mangrove crabs 🦀 and the farmed blue shrimp 🦐 that New Caledonia exports; raw fish in lime and coconut milk 🐟🍋‍🟩🥥 is everyday food. Nouméa also eats French bread 🥖, Vietnamese phở 🍜, a gift of the Vietnamese community, and drinks a cold local beer 🍺.

In the bush the cattle stations of the west coast keep a stockman culture of their own 🤠🐎🐄. Rusa deer 🦌, brought in during the 19th century, run wild and venison is a favourite of Caldoche families, the New Caledonians of European descent. Every August the Bourail fair brings it all together with cattle shows and a rodeo. People go hiking 🥾 on long trails across the mountains of the south and spend weekends camping 🏕️ on the beaches and islets.

New Caledonia currency symbol and the letters you need

New Caledonia pays in the CFP franc, the franc Pacifique, which it shares with French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna. It has the ISO code XPF and no Unicode sign of its own: prices are written 1 000 F, 1 000 XPF or 1 000 F CFP, with a space between thousands and the F after the number. Its value is fixed to the euro: 1,000 francs are worth 8.38 €. The old franc sign ₣ is not used for it; 🪙 is the usual emoji for money here.

French is the official language, so useful accented letters and ligatures include: À Â Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Î Ï Ô Œ Ù Û Ü Ÿ and their small forms à â æ ç è é ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü ÿ, as in Nouméa, Île des Pins and Calédonie. On Windows hold Alt and type 0233 for é, 0232 for è, 0231 for ç and 0238 for î; on a Mac press Option + E then the vowel for an acute, Option + ` for a grave, Option + I for a circumflex and Option + C for ç; on a phone, long-press the plain letter. Quotations go in guillemets with a space inside: « Bonjour ».

New Caledonia also has 28 Kanak languages, written in the Latin alphabet, and four of them, Drehu, Nengone, Paicî and Ajië, can be taken at the baccalaureate. Their names already show the accents above: Xârâcùù, Paicî, Ajië. For the whole French alphabet see our French collection; for the neighbours, our France, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, Vanuatu and Fiji collections.

History, holidays and sport

Captain James Cook sighted the main island in 1774 and named it after Caledonia, the Latin name for Scotland. France took possession on 24 September 1853 and from 1864 to 1897 shipped convicts here ⛓️, along with deported Communards such as Louise Michel. Missionaries left churches ⛪ in almost every village. After the violent clashes of the 1980s, the Matignon Accords of 1988 and the Nouméa Accord of 1998 set out a path to self-determination, and voters chose to stay with France in three referendums 🗳️: 2018, 2020 and 2021, the last boycotted by the independence parties.

24 September is now Citizenship Day, and 14 July 🎆 is celebrated as everywhere in France. In sport ⚽ the best-known New Caledonian is Christian Karembeu, born on Lifou, who won the 1998 World Cup with France. Kanak women play a cricket of their own 🏏, in teams wearing bright, loose robes mission 👗. Nouméa has hosted the Pacific Games three times, in 1966, 1987 and 2011 🏅, and the trade winds make it a favourite spot for windsurfing and kitesurfing 🪁.

CLDR estimates New Caledonia's population at about 300,000 people, nearly all of whom speak French; the 2019 census counted about 270,000. About four in ten are Kanak, and about a quarter of European descent. There are also large communities from Wallis and Futuna 🇼🇫, Tahiti 🇵🇫, Vanuatu 🇻🇺, Vietnam 🇻🇳 and Indonesia 🇮🇩, and Vanuatu 🇻🇺 and Fiji 🇫🇯 are nearby neighbours; Australia 🇦🇺 and New Zealand 🇳🇿 are also close regional neighbours. Beneath the red earth of its mountains lies one of the world's largest nickel deposits ⛏️, smelted at Doniambo in Nouméa 🏭 for more than a century and now wanted for batteries 🔋.