Sierra Leone Emoji

🇸🇱 the Sierra Leone flag emoji is three equal horizontal stripes, green, white and blue. Like other country-code flag emoji, it is not a picture stored in the text but two regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇱, for the country code SL, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you'll see the letters SL, while the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone. Where flags don't show, people write 💚🤍💙 or 🟩⬜🟦.

The flag was raised on 27 April 1961, the day Sierra Leone became independent from Britain. Green stands for agriculture, the natural resources and the hills, white for unity and justice, and blue for the natural harbour of Freetown, one of the largest in the world, and the hope that the country can serve peace. "Sierra Leone flag vs Gabon" is a common search: Gabon 🇬🇦 has the same green over blue but a yellow middle stripe, Sierra Leone a white one.

Sierra Leone symbols: the lion, the Cotton Tree and the diamonds

The name comes from the Portuguese Serra Leoa, Lion Mountains, given in the fifteenth century to the hills above today's Freetown, so the lion 🦁 is the country's emblem. On the coat of arms a lion walks under a zigzag line for the mountains ⛰️, three torches 🔥 burn above it and wavy bars below stand for the sea 🌊; two more lions hold the shield, over the motto Unity, Freedom, Justice. The national anthem is "High We Exalt Thee, Realm of the Free". The football team is the Leone Stars and the money is the leone, both named after the lion.

Freetown was founded in 1792 by Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, people who had escaped slavery in America by joining the British side, and freed Africans landed there through the nineteenth century; ⛓️‍💥 and 🕊️ are often posted with its story. The settlers are said to have gathered to give thanks under a great cotton tree near the shore, and the Cotton Tree 🌳 stood in the middle of the city as its symbol until a rainstorm brought it down on 24 May 2023. In Krio the country is simply Salone.

Diamonds 💎 from the Kono district made Sierra Leone famous, and in 1972 the Star of Sierra Leone, a stone of almost 969 carats, one of the largest diamonds ever found, came out of a mine there ⛏️. The same diamonds helped fund the civil war of 1991–2002, the story behind the film Blood Diamond. Since the peace, 🕊️🤝 has stood for reconciliation, and Sierra Leone is often praised for how its Muslims and Christians live side by side ⛪🤝🕌.

Sierra Leone currency symbol: Le, the leone

The leone has no sign of its own in Unicode: prices are written with the letters Le before the amount, as in Le 50, and the ISO code is SLE. On 1 July 2022 the country introduced the new leone, which dropped three zeros, so 1,000 old leones (code SLL) became 1 new leone; that is why searches for the "Sierra Leone currency symbol 2022" turn up both forms and older prices look a thousand times larger. 💰 and 🪙 are the emoji people use for money in general.

Krio letters Ɛ Ɔ Ŋ and the Mende Kikakui script

English is the official language, but the language nearly everyone shares is Krio, an English-based creole that grew among the freed people of Freetown; CLDR estimates about 8.7 million speakers, close to the whole population of about 9.1 million, most of whom speak it as a second language. CLDR counts about 3.2 million speakers of English, 2.5 million of Mende, spoken in the south and east, and 2.4 million of Temne (Timne), spoken in the north and around Freetown (see the Krio, English, Mende and Timne collections).

The standard spelling of Krio, like that of Mende and Temne, adds three letters to A–Z: ɛ, the open e of "bed", ɔ, the open o of "law", and ŋ, the ng of "sing", as in the Krio tɛnki, thanks. The sounds gb and kp, said with the lips and the back of the tongue at once, are written with two ordinary letters. To type the extra letters in Word on Windows, enter the code and press Alt+X: 025B for ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 014B for ŋ, and 0190 Ɛ, 0186 Ɔ, 014A Ŋ for the capitals. On a Mac switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard, hold Option and type the same codes; on a phone it is easiest to copy them from this page.

Mende also has a script of its own, Kikakui, a syllabary created in the early twentieth century and spread by the Islamic scholar Kisimi Kamara. Each sign stands for a syllable, it is written from right to left, and its name comes from its first syllables, ki 𞠀, ka 𞠁 and ku 𞠂. It was added to Unicode in 2014 with its own digits; many fonts still lack it, so the signs may show as boxes until you install one such as Noto Sans Mende Kikakui. The full set is in the Mende collection.

Sierra Leone Independence Day, Eid and the emoji people send

Independence Day on 27 April is 🇸🇱🎉🎆, with parades, "Happy Independence Day, Salone!" in every family chat and parties from Freetown to London and the Washington, DC area, where large Sierra Leonean communities live 🇬🇧🇺🇸. In 2026 the country marked 65 years of independence.

Most Sierra Leoneans are Muslim, and Ramadan and Eid ☪️🕌🌙 are national occasions: near the end of Ramadan Freetown holds its lantern parade, when neighbourhoods carry huge lit floats through the streets to drums 🥁. Christmas 🎄🎁 and Easter ⛪✝️ are public holidays too, and many families celebrate both, 🙏.

The national dish is cassava leaves: the leaves pounded and cooked in palm oil with fish or meat and served over rice 🥬🍚. Potato leaves, groundnut soup 🥜🍲, okra sauce and pepper soup 🌶️ go over rice too, and Sierra Leoneans will tell you a meal without rice is not a meal 🌾. Jollof 🥘🍗, fried fish 🐟, binch akara (black-eyed bean fritters 🫘), roasted corn 🌽, fried plantain 🍌, mangoes 🥭 and coconuts 🥥 fill the street stalls, with homemade ginger beer 🫚 and poyo, palm wine from the palm tree 🌴, to drink 🍺.

Football, music and life in Salone

Football is the national sport, ⚽🇸🇱 for the Leone Stars, who reached the Africa Cup of Nations in 1994, 1996 and 2021 and held the champions Algeria to a 0–0 draw at the 2021 tournament. Mohamed Kallon and Kei Kamara are among their best-known players, and the actor Idris Elba, whose father was Sierra Leonean, became a citizen in 2019.

Drums 🥁🪘 lead the masquerades 🎭 and dances 💃🕺 of holidays and society festivals, and Salone music, the country's own Afropop 🎤🎶, plays from every okada 🏍️, the motorbike taxis that, with keke tricycles 🛺, carry most of the traffic. Gara, the indigo tie-dyed cloth, is sewn into dresses and shirts 👗🧵. To reach Lungi airport ✈️ you cross the Sierra Leone River estuary from Freetown by ferry ⛴️ or water taxi 🚤, past fishermen in long wooden canoes 🛶.

Freetown's houses climb green hills above the sea 🏘️, and its Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was the first Western-style university in West Africa, which earned the city the name "Athens of West Africa" 🎓. South of the city lie the beaches of the peninsula, River No. 2, Tokeh and Bureh with its surf club 🏖️🏄, and the Banana Islands 🏝️. Inland, chimpanzees 🐒 are cared for at the Tacugama sanctuary, pygmy hippos 🦛 live around Tiwai Island, forest elephants 🐘 in the Gola Rainforest 🏞️, and sea turtles 🐢 nest on the coast. Freetown is one of the wettest capitals in the world, so 🌧️☔ is the caption from May to October.