Niger Emoji & Symbols

The flag of Niger has three horizontal bands, orange, white and green, with an orange disc in the middle of the white band. It was adopted in 1959, the year before independence from France. The orange stands for the Sahara desert that covers the north, the white for purity, the green for hope and the farmland of the south along the Niger River, and the orange disc for the sun. The official flag is a little squarer than most, though it is usually drawn in the common rectangle.

The Niger flag emoji 🇳🇪 is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇳 and 🇪, spelling NE, the country's ISO code; phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag. The Niger flag was added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, and it appears as a flag on supported platforms. Windows is the exception: its emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC 🇳🇪 usually appears as the letters NE, while the person you send it to on a phone sees the flag. Do not confuse it with 🇳🇬, which is Nigeria.

Where flags do not show, people rebuild it from parts: 🧡🤍💚 are the three bands and 🟠 the sun disc, so 🇳🇪🧡🤍💚 is the usual colour line for bios, match comments and national-day posts.

Niger flag vs India flag, and the other Niger symbols

Niger's flag is often mistaken for India's 🇮🇳, and "why is the Niger flag similar to India" is a common question. The likeness is a coincidence of colours: both use orange or saffron, white and green bands with a circle in the middle. The differences are easy to see once you know them: India's circle is the navy-blue Ashoka Chakra, a wheel with 24 spokes, while Niger's is a plain orange disc for the sun; Niger's orange is a deeper orange, and its flag is nearly square where India's is the usual 2:3.

The coat of arms carries the same sun ☀️ in the middle of a green shield, with crossed Tuareg swords and a spear ⚔️ on one side, three heads of millet 🌾 on the other and a zebu's head 🐂 below, framed by national flags. The motto is Fraternité, Travail, Progrès, and since 2023 the national anthem has been L'Honneur de la Patrie.

The people of Niger are Nigeriens, written Nigérien and Nigérienne in French with an é, and said roughly nee-ZHAIR-ee-en. Nigerian means Nigeria, the big southern neighbour, so the two are worth keeping apart. The currency is the West African CFA franc, shared with seven other countries of the West African monetary union. It has no Unicode currency sign: prices are written 1 000 F CFA or FCFA, and the code is XOF.

How to type the letters of Hausa, Zarma, Tamajaq and French

Hausa is by far the biggest language of Niger, with about 11 million first-language and 4.5 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue 2020 estimates), and it is the everyday trade language across the south and east. It is written in the Latin alphabet with hooked letters: ɓ and ɗ are implosive b and d, ƙ is an ejective k, as in ƙasa, land or country, and ƴ is a glottalised y. Niger writes that last sound ƴ, while Nigeria writes it ʼy with an apostrophe; ʼ also marks the glottal stop. Hausa is also written in Arabic script, called Ajami.

Zarma, spoken by about 4.5 million people along the Niger River in the west, around Niamey and Dosso, adds ɲ for the sound of Spanish ñ, ŋ for the ng of English sing, and the nasal vowels ã ẽ õ; CLDR's Zarma alphabet also lists š and ž. Fulfulde, the language of the Fulani herders (about 1.8 million speakers), uses ɓ ɗ ƴ ɲ ŋ too. Tamajaq, the Tuareg language of the north (about 1.6 million, listed as Tamashek), writes ǝ for its short central vowel, ɣ for a gargled gh, and dotted ḍ ṭ ẓ for its emphatic consonants; Tuareg also keep their own ancient script, Tifinagh. Watch the look-alikes: ɣ is a Latin letter, not the Greek gamma γ, and the capital of ǝ is Ǝ.

To type them on Windows, write the code and press Alt+X in Word: 0253 gives ɓ, 0257 ɗ, 0199 ƙ, 01B4 ƴ, 0272 ɲ, 014B ŋ, 01DD ǝ, 0263 ɣ. In HTML use ɓ for ɓ, ɗ for ɗ, ƙ for ƙ and ƴ for ƴ. Some phone keyboards for Hausa offer the hooked letters; otherwise copy them from the grid above. For French, an AZERTY keyboard has é è à ç on its own keys; on a US keyboard use Alt+0233 for é, Alt+0232 for è, Alt+0224 for à and Alt+0231 for ç, or Option+E then E for é on a Mac. Our Hausa, Zarma, Central-Eastern Niger Fulfulde, Tamashek and French collections have each language's full alphabet.

Nigerien food emoji: boule, tuwo, kilishi and three glasses of tea

Millet 🌾 is the grain of Niger. It is drunk as boule or fura, balls of millet dough crumbled into water or soured milk 🥣🥛, and eaten as tuwo, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum with a sauce of okra, baobab leaves or moringa 🍲🥬. Moringa leaves, zogala, are also eaten as a salad with peanuts 🥜. Rice cooked in a tomato sauce, riz au gras, is the dish for guests 🍚, and cowpeas, niébé, go into fritters and stews 🫘.

Meat means kilishi, thin sheets of beef dried in the sun and coated with a peanut and chilli paste 🥩🌶️, and tchintchinga, spiced skewers grilled at night along the streets of Niamey 🍢🍖. Fish from the Niger River, especially the big capitaine, is grilled whole 🐟. The red onions of Galmi, the violet de Galmi, are sold all over West Africa 🧅. Herders make tchoukou, a hard dried cheese 🧀; the oases of the Aïr and Kawar grow dates 🌴, and the south grows mangoes 🥭.

Tea is the ritual. Strong green tea is brewed in a small pot over charcoal and poured from high up into small glasses in three rounds, 🍵🍵🍵: a well-known saying of the Sahara and North Africa likens the three glasses, from bitter to gentle, to life, love and death 🫖. Cold drinks are red hibiscus bissap 🌺 and ginger juice 🫚.

The Sahara, the Tuareg and the herders' festivals: 🐪 🏜️ 🎸

Most of Niger lies in the Sahara 🏜️. In the north rise the Aïr Mountains ⛰️, and east of them the sand sea of the Ténéré; the Aïr and Ténéré Natural Reserves are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Agadez, the gateway to the desert, is built around a mud-brick Great Mosque 🕌 whose minaret, about 27 metres high, is one of the tallest earthen structures in the world; its old town has been on the UNESCO list since 2013. Camel caravans, the azalai, still carry salt from the oasis of Bilma across the Ténéré 🐪🧂, and Tuareg families camp in tents of leather or matting ⛺.

Tuareg music has gone around the world. Tuareg guitarists such as Bombino, from near Agadez, and Mdou Moctar play the hypnotic electric "desert blues" 🎸, and the imzad, a one-string fiddle played only by Tuareg women, is on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage for Algeria, Mali and Niger 🎻.

At the end of the rainy season, around September, Tuareg and Fulani herders gather at In-Gall for the Cure Salée, when the herds come to the salty pastures to graze 🐄🐐🐑🐪. It is a festival of camel and horse parades 🐎🏇, drums and dancing 🪘🥁💃🕺, and of the Gerewol of the Wodaabe, where young men in make-up and finery dance to be chosen by the women.

Holidays, sport, the river and wildlife: 🎉 🤼 🛶 🦒

Niger celebrates 3 August, Independence Day (1960), which is also the national tree day, when people plant trees against the advancing desert: 🇳🇪🎉🌱. 18 December is the Fête de la République, for the proclamation of the Republic in 1958, held each year in a different regional capital, and 24 April is Concord Day, remembering the 1995 peace accord 🕊️. Almost all Nigeriens are Muslim, so Ramadan 🌙, the end of the fast and Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) 🐏🕌 are the great feasts, greeted in Hausa with Barka da Sallah!; Christmas 🎄 is a public holiday too.

The national passion is traditional wrestling 🤼: the national championship fills stadiums, and the winner takes home a sabre 🗡️. Football ⚽ is everywhere, and the national team played the Africa Cup of Nations in 2012 and 2013. Niger's two Olympic medals are boxer Issaka Daboré's bronze in 1972 🥊🥉 and Abdoul Razak Issoufou's taekwondo silver in 2016 🥋🥈.

The Niger River crosses the south-west, past Niamey, the capital, where pirogues 🛶 carry people and goods, fishermen cast nets 🎣 and the sunsets over the water 🌅 are best seen from the Kennedy Bridge 🌉; motorbike taxis, kabu-kabu, fill the streets 🛵. Most of Niger's wild West African giraffes live near Kouré, east of Niamey, roaming among farmers' fields. W National Park 🏞️, shared with Benin and Burkina Faso and named for the W-shaped bends of the river, has elephants, lions, leopards, hippos and crocodiles 🐘🦁🐆🦛🐊. And the Ténéré is dinosaur country 🦕🦖: Nigersaurus, a long-necked plant-eater named after Niger, and Sarcosuchus, the giant crocodile nicknamed SuperCroc, were both dug up at Gadoufaoua.