Sint Maarten Emoji & Flag

🇸🇽 is the flag of Sint Maarten, the southern, Dutch half of the island of Saint Martin in the north-eastern Caribbean. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇽, which phones and Macs draw as a flag. The code SX was assigned after 10 October 2010, when the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved and Sint Maarten became a country of its own inside the Kingdom of the Netherlands; the flag emoji has been on phones since 2015.

The flag itself was adopted in 1985: a red band over a blue band, with a white triangle at the hoist carrying the coat of arms. On the shield are the Courthouse in Philipsburg, the yellow sage (the national flower) and the Border Monument that marks the line between the two halves of the island; above it a brown pelican, the national bird, flies in front of a rising sun, and the ribbon reads Semper pro grediens, "always progressing". At emoji size the coat of arms is a tiny blur, which is why 🇸🇽 is sometimes mistaken for the Philippine flag 🇵🇭, which puts blue on top and red below.

On Windows the flag usually appears as the letters SX, because Windows' emoji font has no country flag pictures. Phones, Macs and most apps show the flag, so a 🇸🇽 you paste from Windows still arrives as a flag on the other side.

St. Maarten emoji for the beach, the boats and the planes

Most St. Maarten emoji come from the coast. 🏝️ 🌴 🏖️ ☀️ 🌊 cover the island itself, with ⛱️ 👙 🩴 🕶️ 🧴 for a day on the sand at Mullet Bay, Great Bay or Dawn Beach and 🌅 for the sunset over Simpson Bay. Under water, 🤿 🐠 🐢 🪸 🐚 🦀 are snorkelling and diving: reef fish, sea turtles, coral and conch shells.

🛬 ✈️ 📸 belong to Maho Beach, where planes landing at Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) pass only a short height above the sand and plane spotters line up with cameras. ⛵ is sailing and above all the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta, the big sailing week held every March; 🛥️ 🚤 ⚓ are the yachts in Simpson Bay Lagoon, 🛳️ the cruise ships that dock at Philipsburg, and ⛴️ the ferries to Anguilla and St. Barths.

🤝 fits the island's nickname, The Friendly Island, and the open border between the Dutch and French sides: people drive from 🇸🇽 to 🇲🇫 without stopping. 🌺 🌼 🦎 🥥 🥭 add hibiscus, a yellow flower for the yellow sage, the iguanas you meet in gardens, coconuts and mangoes, and 🌀 is the hurricane season that every islander watches from June to November.

Food, drink and carnival emoji

For food, 🦞 🐟 🍗 🍲 🌶️ stand for grilled lobster, saltfish with johnny cakes, barbecued chicken and ribs from roadside grills, pots of callaloo or stew, and the hot pepper sauce on every table. 🍹 is a beach-bar cocktail, 🥃 rum and guavaberry, the island's traditional liqueur made from rum and the small wild guavaberry fruit, and 🍺 a cold beer after the regatta.

Sint Maarten Carnival, held in the weeks around Easter with a Carnival Village in Philipsburg, J'ouvert morning and the Grand Carnival Parade, is sent as 🎭 🪶 💃 🕺 🥁 🎶 🎉: costumes, feathers, dancing in the street and soca and calypso from the trucks. 🧡 👑 go with King's Day on 27 April, when the Dutch side wears orange like the rest of the Kingdom, and 🎆 with New Year's Eve. Other days people mark with the flag are Emancipation Day on 1 July and St. Martin's Day on 11 November, a holiday on both sides of the island.

In sport, 🏏 is cricket, followed here as across the English-speaking Caribbean, ⚽ football, and 🎣 deep-sea fishing. In Philipsburg, 🏛️ is the 18th-century Courthouse on Front Street, 🛍️ 💎 are the duty-free shops and jewellers that line it, and 🎰 the casinos on the Dutch side.

Sint Maarten currency symbol: $, ƒ and €

Prices on Sint Maarten are very often given in US dollars, written $ and accepted almost everywhere, so $ 💵 are the signs you will use most. The official currency was the Netherlands Antillean guilder, written NAf. or with the florin sign ƒ (originally from the word florijn); in 2025 it was replaced by the Caribbean guilder, shared with Curaçao and abbreviated Cg. Across the border on the French side, prices are in euros, €.

To type ƒ on Windows hold Alt and type 0131 on the number pad; on a Mac with a US keyboard press Option + F. The euro sign is Alt + 0128 on Windows and Option + Shift + 2 on a Mac; in HTML they are ƒ and €.

Languages of Sint Maarten and their letters

English and Dutch are both official. English is the everyday language: of the island's roughly 46,000 people (a CLDR estimate) about 31,000 speak it, with about 5,000 speakers of Spanish and about 1,600 of Dutch by the same estimates; Papiamento and French Creole are heard too. English needs no special letters, so the letters on this page are the Dutch ones used in official names and documents: É é for stress, as in één (one), and the diaeresis in Ë ë and Ï ï, which shows that a vowel starts a new syllable, as in ideeën or beïnvloeden.

On Windows, é is Alt + 0233, ë Alt + 0235 and ï Alt + 0239 (capitals É 0201, Ë 0203, Ï 0207). On a Mac, press Option + E then the letter for é, and Option + U then the letter for ë or ï. On a phone, hold down e or i to pick the accented form. The full Dutch alphabet is on the Dutch Letters page, and the Spanish one, for the island's Spanish speakers, on Spanish Letters & Accents; the neighbours in the Kingdom have pages of their own under Curaçao, Aruba and the Netherlands.