Serbia Emoji & Symbols

🇷🇸 the Serbian flag is the emoji people reach for first: a match, a trip home, a name in a bio. Its three stripes work as hearts, ❤️💙🤍, red over blue over white. 🦅 stands for the white double-headed eagle of the coat of arms, and it is also the nickname of the national teams, the Orlovi, the Eagles. ☦️, the Orthodox cross, is used by the many Serbs who belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church, and 👑 for the crown above the eagle.

🥃 is rakija, above all šljivovica, plum brandy, poured in small glasses at every welcome, wedding and slava with the toast "Živeli!" (cheers). Serbia is one of the world's largest plum growers, and the making and drinking of šljivovica was added to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2022. There is no plum emoji, so 🥃 carries it. ☕ is domaća kafa, home-made coffee boiled in a small pot and drunk slowly; "Idemo na kafu?" (shall we go for coffee?) is how most plans begin.

🎾 means Novak Đoković, who has won more men's Grand Slam singles titles than any other player and took Olympic gold 🥇 in Paris in 2024. 🏀🃏 is Nikola Jokić, "the Joker", the NBA's most valuable player three times between 2021 and 2024. These are the emoji you will see under any Serbian sports post.

Serbian flag emoji: copy and paste 🇷🇸, and the Serbian symbols

The Serbian flag emoji is not one stored picture. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇷 and 🇸, the country code RS, which phones and Macs draw as the red, blue and white flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji shows as the letters RS; the person reading it on a phone still sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_rs:.

The tricolour reads red, blue, white from the top; Russia's flag has the same colours in reverse, white, blue, red. The state flag adds the coat of arms, a white double-headed eagle on a red shield under a crown, with a smaller shield on its breast showing a cross between four firesteels. Those four shapes, ocila, are popularly read as four Cyrillic letters С, for the motto Само слога Србина спасава, "only unity saves the Serbs". Unicode has no picture of either, so people write 🦅☦️ or ☦️ with ССС С.

Neighbours have their own collections: see Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, North Macedonia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Serbian food emoji: ćevapi, pljeskavica, burek and rakija

Serbian cooking starts at the grill, roštilj. There is no ćevapi emoji, so people build one: 🍖🫓🧅, little minced-meat sausages in soft lepinja flatbread with chopped raw onion. 🍔 stands in for pljeskavica, a wide spiced patty, and 🌶️ for the peppers that come with it; the town of Leskovac in the south holds a grill festival, the Roštiljijada, every late summer.

🥧🥛 is breakfast: burek, filo pie with meat or cheese, with a glass of drinking yogurt. 🥧 also covers gibanica, the layered cheese-and-egg pie of every family gathering. 🧀 is kajmak, a soft salty cream, and the white cheese of Sjenica; 🫑 is ajvar, the relish of roasted red peppers that families make in big pots every autumn; 🥬 is sarma, sour cabbage leaves rolled around meat and rice; 🫘🍲 is pasulj, thick bean soup; 🌽 is proja, cornbread; and 🐖 is the whole roast pig or lamb, pečenje, turning on a spit at a celebration.

To drink: 🥃 for rakija, ☕ for coffee, 🍷🍇 for the wine of Fruška Gora above Novi Sad and of Župa in central Serbia, 🍺 for beer, and 🥂 for "Živeli!" at the table.

Slava, Christmas and Easter: Serbian holiday emoji

🕯️🍞🌾🍷 is slava, the Serbian family feast of its patron saint, handed down from father to son and on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2014. The family lights a tall slava candle, the priest blesses the round slava bread, slavski kolač, and žito, boiled wheat with walnuts and sugar, is offered to every guest. Unicode has no wheat ear, so 🌾 stands in. The greeting is "Srećna slava!"

Serbian Orthodox Christmas, Božić, falls on 7 January. On Christmas Eve, Badnji dan, a young oak branch, the badnjak, is brought home and burned 🪵🔥, and on Christmas Day the family breaks česnica, a round bread with a coin 🪙 baked inside, which brings luck to whoever finds it. People greet each other with "Hristos se rodi!" (Christ is born) and answer "Vaistinu se rodi!" (truly he is born). The decorated tree 🎄 and fireworks 🎆 belong to New Year's Eve, Nova godina, and many celebrate again on the night of 13 to 14 January, the Serbian (Orthodox) New Year.

At Easter, Vaskrs, eggs 🥚 are dyed, the first one always red, and people knock them together to see whose shell survives; the greeting is "Hristos vaskrse!" with the answer "Vaistinu vaskrse!" ⛪ fits the monasteries that are Serbia's oldest treasures, among them Studenica, built in the late 12th century and listed by UNESCO, and the Church of Saint Sava in Belgrade, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. Statehood Day, Sretenje, on 15 February, marks the start of the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 and the first constitution of 1835.

Belgrade, nature, music and sports emoji

🏰 is Kalemegdan, the Belgrade Fortress on the ridge where the Sava flows into the Danube; its park is where Belgraders watch the sunset, and where older men gather over chess boards ♟️. 🏛️ fits the National Assembly and the National Museum, and the same 🏰 serves for Petrovaradin Fortress across the Danube from Novi Sad, home of the Exit festival since its early years, and for Golubac at the mouth of the Iron Gates gorge. Beograd means "white city".

🏞️🌲 is Tara National Park above the Drina, home of the rare Serbian spruce, and 🏠 the famous little house built on a rock in the middle of the Drina near Bajina Bašta. 🏔️🎿 is Kopaonik, the country's biggest ski resort.

🎺 is the trumpet festival in Guča, where brass bands play for days; the 2020 edition was canceled. 🪗 is the accordion of folk music and the kafana, 🎻 stands in for the gusle, a one-stringed bowed instrument to which epic songs are sung, and 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 for the kolo, the chain dance in which everyone holds hands; both singing to the gusle and the kolo are on UNESCO's heritage lists.

Sports: ⚽⭐ is Crvena zvezda, Red Star Belgrade, which won the European Cup in 1991; 🤽 water polo, in which Serbia won Olympic gold in 2016, 2021 and 2024; 🏐 the women's volleyball team, world champions in 2018 and 2022; plus 🎾 and 🏀. ⚡ is for Nikola Tesla, born to a Serbian family in 1856 and pictured on the 100-dinar note; Belgrade's airport and a museum bear his name. And 🧛: the word vampire reached English, by way of German and French, from Serbian vampir, after Austrian officials reported Serbian village vampire cases in the 1720s.

Serbian letters copy and paste: Cyrillic, Latin and the dinar

Serbian is written in two alphabets, and Serbs read both. The Constitution makes Cyrillic, ćirilica, the official script, while Latin, latinica, is everywhere on screens, shop signs and in the press. CLDR estimates that Serbian is spoken by about 6.6 million people in Serbia, out of a population of about 6.7 million. Both alphabets have 30 letters and match one to one: each letter is one sound, after Vuk Karadžić's 19th-century reform and its rule "write as you speak, read as it is written".

In Cyrillic, Ђ Ј Љ Њ Ћ Џ write the sounds đ, j, lj, nj, ć and dž with one letter each. In Latin, Serbian adds č (a hard "ch", Cyrillic ч), ć (a softer "ch", ћ), đ (a soft "j" sound, ђ), š ("sh", ш) and ž (the "s" in measure, ж), and writes lj, nj and dž (љ, њ, џ) as two letters. The alphabets are shared with Montenegrin and Bosnian, and Latin with Croatian; see our Serbian and Serbian (Latin) collections for the full alphabets.

On Windows, add the Serbian (Latin) or Serbian (Cyrillic) keyboard. Both are QWERTZ: in Latin, Š and Đ sit on the keys right of P, Č and Ć right of L, Ž next to Ć; the Cyrillic layout puts Ш Ђ Ч Ћ Ж on the same keys and Љ Њ where Q and W are. On a Mac add Serbian or Serbian (Latin), and on a phone add Serbian and switch scripts, or long-press c, d, s or z. In HTML, write č ć đ š ž, capitalised for Č Ć Đ Š Ž.

The Serbian currency is the dinar, code RSD, divided into 100 para. It has no Unicode sign: prices are written 500 din. in Latin or 500 дин. in Cyrillic, with a decimal comma. In Vojvodina, the northern province, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and other minority languages are also in official use, each with its own collection here.