Samoa Emoji & Symbols

The Samoa flag emoji 🇼🇸 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, W and S, which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags, this one among them, became emoji in 2015. The code WS is a leftover of the old name: the country was called Western Samoa until 1997. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters WS instead, but the text is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. Do not confuse it with 🇦🇸, the flag of American Samoa, the US territory to the east: dark blue with a white triangle and an eagle.

The flag of Samoa has flown in its present form since 1949: a red field with a blue rectangle in the upper corner carrying five white stars, the Southern Cross ⭐ as it is seen in the Samoan night sky. The colours are usually read as red for courage, white for purity and blue for freedom, so people paste the flag as ❤️🤍💙 when they want it as hearts. It is often mixed up with the flag of Taiwan, which also has a red field and a blue corner, but Taiwan's corner holds a white sun rather than stars.

Faith is the other national symbol. Samoa's motto is Faʻavae i le Atua Sāmoa, "Samoa is founded on God", and its coat of arms shows the Southern Cross over a coconut palm 🌴 with a cross ✝️ on top. Nearly every village has a large church ⛪, often white or pastel, at its centre, and Sunday is kept for church and family, which is why ✝️🙏⛪📖 are everyday emoji in Samoan chats rather than decoration.

Samoa symbols: Upolu, Savaiʻi, reefs and flying foxes

Samoa is two large volcanic islands, Upolu, home of the capital Apia and most of the people, and the bigger, quieter Savaiʻi, with small Manono and Apolima between them. 🏝️🌴🥥🏖️ are the white-sand beaches and coconut groves of the coast, and 🌋⛰️ the green volcanic interior. On Savaiʻi the eruption of Mount Matavanu in 1905–1911 sent lava over whole villages; at Saleaula the walls of a church still stand in the black lava field, and at the Alofaaga blowholes guides throw a coconut 🥥 into the spout to watch the sea fire it into the air. On Upolu, the To Sua Ocean Trench is a deep swimming hole 🏊 reached by a long wooden ladder.

Tropical rain 🌧️ and rainbows 🌈 come with the climate, and the reefs offer turtles 🐢, dolphins 🐬, reef fish 🐠 and humpback whales 🐋 in the southern winter. On land, the forests hold the peʻa, the Samoan flying fox 🦇, and the manumea, the tooth-billed pigeon that is Samoa's national bird 🐦; it is critically endangered and has no emoji of its own. The national flower is the teuila, red ginger, which has no emoji either, so 🌺 stands in for it, and for the flower tucked behind an ear on the way to church or a dance.

Faʻa Samoa: the fale, the ʻava ceremony, siva and tatau

Faʻa Samoa, the Samoan way, is life organised around the ʻaiga, the extended family 👪, and the village, led by its chiefs (matai). 🛖 is the nearest emoji to the fale, the open-sided house with a domed thatched roof on posts, where the village council meets. Important gatherings open with the ʻava ceremony: a drink made from the root of the kava plant is mixed in a wooden bowl, the tanoa, and served in a polished coconut-shell cup 🥥 to each chief in order of rank. Unicode has no kava or tanoa, so people write the word instead.

💃🕺🥁🎶 are the siva, the graceful Samoan dance, and the hard-slapping men's faʻataupati 👏; 🔥 is the siva afi, the fire-knife dance, in which a dancer spins a blade wrapped in burning cloth at both ends. The tatau, the traditional tattoo, is tapped into the skin with bone combs and a small mallet: the peʻa for men runs from the waist to the knees, the malu for women covers the thighs. There is no tattoo emoji, and the many "Samoan symbols and meanings" people look for are tatau motifs, drawn patterns rather than characters you can copy, so the emoji on this page are what fits in a message.

Samoan food emoji: the umu, palusami, oka and koko Samoa

Sunday after church means toʻonaʻi, a family meal cooked in the umu 🔥, an earth oven of hot stones covered with leaves. There is no emoji for taro or breadfruit, the two staples, so 🍠 stands in for talo and 🍌 for green bananas; 🥬 is the taro leaf of palusami, leaves wrapped around thick coconut cream and baked, and 🐖🍖 are the roast pig of a feast. 🍋🐟🥥 make oka, raw fish in lemon juice and coconut cream.

🥫 is pisupo, canned corned beef, whose name comes from "pea soup", once the label on canned food in the islands. 🍜 is sapasui, Samoan chop suey with glass noodles, 🥞 is panikeke, round fried dough named after the pancake, and ☕🍫 is koko Samoa, a drink made from locally grown cocoa beans roasted and pounded into a paste. 🍺 is Vailima, the beer brewed near Apia and named after the village of Vailima.

Manu Samoa, kilikiti and Independence Day emoji

Rugby 🏉 is the national sport. The men's rugby union team, Manu Samoa, performs the siva tau, a war dance, facing its opponents before each match, and a nation of around 200,000 people has produced a long line of players for the top clubs of New Zealand, Australia, Europe and Japan. Samoa won the World Sevens Series in 2009–10, and in rugby league Toa Samoa reached the final of the 2021 Rugby League World Cup, played in 2022, so 🏉🇼🇸💪 is the country's best-known combo. 🏏 is kilikiti, Samoan cricket, played between whole villages with a long club-like bat, often with singing and dancing on the side. Samoa's first Olympic medal came in weightlifting 🏋️: Ele Opeloge's silver from Beijing 2008.

Samoa became independent from New Zealand on 1 January 1962, the first Pacific Island country to regain its independence in the 20th century. Because 1 January falls in the holidays, Independence Day is celebrated on 1 June, with a parade in Apia, speeches, dances and fautasi 🚣 longboat races in the harbour, and feeds fill with 🇼🇸🎉 and ❤️🤍💙. Samoan communities in Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere hold their own celebrations. In early September, the Teuila Festival in Apia brings a week of siva, fire-knife dancing 🔥 and the crowning of Miss Samoa, and on White Sunday (Lotu Tamaiti), the second Sunday of October, children 🧒 dress in white, lead the church service and are served first at the meal.

Samoa also sits right beside the International Date Line. In 2011 it moved to the western side of it to share a working week with New Zealand and Australia, and skipped Friday 30 December altogether. Since then, Samoa has been among the first countries on Earth to see each new day, so its New Year's fireworks 🎆 go off almost a full day before those of American Samoa, less than 200 km away.

Samoan letters ā ē ī ō ū ʻ and the tālā

Samoan is the first language of nearly everyone in Samoa; CLDR estimates count around 210,000 speakers in the country, and English is the other official language, used in government, business and schools. The Samoan alphabet is short: the vowels a e i o u, the consonants f g l m n p s t v, and h k r in borrowed words. The letter g is said like the ng in "singer", so Pago Pago sounds like "Pango Pango" and faʻafetai (thank you) has no g at all. See our Samoan collection for the language itself, and the American Samoa and Tokelau collections for the other places where it is spoken.

Two marks go beyond A–Z. The macron on ā ē ī ō ū marks a long vowel, as in Sāmoa and tālā, and the ʻokina (koma liliu), ʻ, marks a glottal stop, as in Savaiʻi and faʻafetai. The correct character is the modifier letter turned comma, U+02BB; a plain apostrophe ' or the curly quote ‘ looks alike but is punctuation, not a letter. In everyday writing both marks are often left out (Samoa, Talofa). To type them: on a Mac switch to the ABC – Extended input source and press Option + A then the vowel for the macron; on a phone, long-press the vowel. For ʻ, copy it from the grid above, search "turned comma" in the Mac Character Viewer (Ctrl + Cmd + Space), or in Word type 02BB and press Alt + X; in HTML write ʻ.

The money is the Samoan tālā (code WST), whose name is the Samoan form of "dollar"; it divides into 100 sene, from "cent". It has no sign of its own in Unicode: prices are written WS$, or simply $ at home, so $ 💵 🪙 are the characters to copy.