Slovakia Emoji

The Slovakia flag emoji 🇸🇰 shows three horizontal stripes, white, blue and red, with the coat of arms set toward the pole side. The white-blue-red tricolour was first raised by Slovaks in the revolution of 1848; the coat of arms was added in 1992, a few months before Slovakia became an independent country on 1 January 1993. The shield is what tells the flag apart: without it the stripes would be Russia's 🇷🇺, and Slovenia's 🇸🇮 uses the same three colours with a shield of its own, so 🇸🇰 and 🇸🇮 get swapped by accident all the time. For the colours alone, people line up 🤍💙❤️, or stack ⬜🟦🟥 one per line as a small text flag.

Like every country flag, 🇸🇰 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇸 + 🇰 for the country code SK. iPhones, Android phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters SK instead, but the people you send it to still see 🇸🇰. From 1918 to 1992 Slovaks and Czechs shared one state, Czechoslovakia, and 🇸🇰🤝🇨🇿 is a friendly combo on both sides of the border to this day (see our Czechia emoji collection). Slovakia joined the European Union 🇪🇺 in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2009.

The coat of arms is a silver double cross standing on the middle peak of three blue hills on a red shield. The double cross came from Byzantium: it appears in the arms of the Kingdom of Hungary from the 12th century, and Slovaks connect it with Saints Cyril and Methodius, who came to Great Moravia in 863. The three hills are traditionally read as the Tatra, Fatra and Mátra ranges; the Mátra is now in Hungary. Unicode has no Slovak cross of its own. When people look for a Slovak cross emoji, the closest character is ☨, the Cross of Lorraine, two crossbars with the upper one shorter, the same outline; ☦️, the Orthodox cross, is a different design with a slanted bar at the foot. ☨⛰️ is the coat of arms in two characters. The linden 🌳 (lipa) is the national tree.

Slovak letters and the euro sign € to copy and paste

Slovak adds 17 letters with diacritics to A–Z, all in the grid in capital and small form: Á Ä Č Ď É Í Ĺ Ľ Ň Ó Ô Ŕ Š Ť Ú Ý Ž. The acute, called dĺžeň (length mark), makes a vowel long and changes words: pas is a passport, pás a belt. Slovak also puts it on two consonants that can carry a syllable on their own, Ĺ and Ŕ, as in vĺča (wolf cub) and vŕba (willow). The caron, mäkčeň (softener), turns c s z into č š ž (ch, sh and the s of pleasure) and softens d t n l into ď ť ň ľ. In print the small ď ť ľ and the capital Ľ wear it as a short stroke that looks like an apostrophe; they are still single letters, not a letter plus ’.

Two vowels look unusual: ä, the široké e (wide e), in words such as mäso (meat) and päť (five), which most speakers today pronounce like e, and ô, the vokáň, a diphthong said uo, as in kôň (horse) and stôl (table). The alphabet also counts ch, dz and dž as letters of their own, but they are typed as two characters; Unicode separately encodes dž and dz, but only dž appears in the Gaj Latin digraph set. Quotation marks open low and close high, „Ahoj“, with ‚…‘ inside a quote, and some books use »…«. The full alphabet in order is in our Slovak letters collection; Czech, which Slovaks read without effort, has its own, and the Hungarian collection covers the language of Slovakia's largest minority, around 600,000 speakers by CLDR estimates.

To type them, the Slovak keyboard (QWERTZ) has ľ š č ť ž ý á í é on the number row and dead keys for the rest. Without it, Windows Alt codes cover á (Alt+0225), é (0233), í (0237), ó (0243), ú (0250), ý (0253), ä (0228), ô (0244), š (0154) and ž (0158); for the other letters type the code and press Alt+X in Word (010D then Alt+X gives č). On a Mac, Option+E then a vowel gives the acute, Option+U the ä and Option+I the ô, and the ABC – Extended layout adds Option+V for the caron. On a phone, long-press the letter. In HTML: č š ž ľ ô.

Slovakia has paid in euros € 💶 since 1 January 2009, when the euro replaced the Slovak koruna (crown), written Sk. Prices put the sign after the number with a decimal comma: 4,50 €. Slovakia's own euro coins 🪙 carry three national designs: Kriváň peak in the High Tatras on the 1, 2 and 5 cent coins, Bratislava Castle on the 10, 20 and 50 cent coins, and the double cross on three hills on the €1 and €2. They are struck at Kremnica, a mint working since the 14th century.

Slovak food emoji: halušky, bryndza and Kofola

Slovakia's national dish takes three emoji: 🥔🧀🥓 is bryndzové halušky, small potato dumplings tossed with bryndza, a soft, tangy sheep's cheese, and topped with crisp bacon. Bryndza 🐑 comes from the shepherd huts of the mountains (salaše), which also sell smoked oštiepok cheese; Slovenská bryndza is protected as a regional product in the EU. 🥟 is pirohy, half-moon dumplings filled with bryndza or potato, 🥞 lokše, thin potato pancakes, and 🧄 langoš, fried dough rubbed with garlic, the favourite at every fair and swimming pool.

🍲 is kapustnica, sauerkraut soup with smoked sausage and dried mushrooms 🍄, which most families serve on Christmas Eve; picking mushrooms in the autumn woods is a national pastime of its own. 🍺 is beer, and 🥃 the strong stuff: slivovica from plums and borovička from juniper berries. 🍷🍇 are the vineyards of the Small Carpathians and the south, and the small Slovak part of the Tokaj wine region in the east. 🥤 is Kofola, the herbal cola created in Czechoslovakia in 1960 that pubs still pour on tap. The toast with all of it is Na zdravie!

Bratislava emoji, castles and the High Tatras

Bratislava emoji start with 🏰, Bratislava Castle above the Danube, a complex with an irregular ground plan and an interior courtyard, often compared to an upturned table. 🛸 is the UFO, the flying-saucer restaurant and lookout on top of the pylon of the SNP Bridge 🌉 (Most SNP, opened in 1972), and ⛪ the Art Nouveau Blue Church of St Elizabeth, pale blue from its roof to its walls. 🚢 is the Danube, with boats downstream to Budapest and upstream to Vienna. Beyond the capital, 🏰 also stands for Spiš Castle, one of the largest castle complexes in Central Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and for Bojnice, Orava and Trenčín. ⛏️ is Banská Štiavnica, the silver-mining town on the UNESCO list, and 🏠 the log houses of Čičmany, painted with white geometric patterns, and the mountain village of Vlkolínec.

🏔️ is the High Tatras, often called the smallest alpine mountains in the world, with Gerlachovský štít, about 2,655 m, the highest peak of the whole Carpathian range, and Kriváň, the peak on the coins and a symbol of the Slovak nation. 🌲🥾 are the marked trails, 🚠 the cable car to the summit of Lomnický štít, and 🏞️🪜 Slovak Paradise (Slovenský raj), a national park where hikers climb gorges on ladders and chains beside the waterfalls. 🧊 is the Dobšinská Ice Cave, part of a UNESCO-listed cave system, and ♨️ the spas: at Piešťany the symbol of the town is a statue of a man breaking his crutch 🩼, healed by the waters. 🐻🐺 Brown bears and wolves still live in Slovakia's forests, and in the mountains bears are a real thing hikers watch out for.

Slovakia emoji for folk traditions and holidays

🪈 is the fujara, the long shepherd's overtone flute, close to two metres tall, on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage; 🪗 the heligónka, a button accordion; 🎻 the string bands, among them the music of Terchová, also on the UNESCO list. 🪓🕺 is the odzemok, a leaping men's dance with a shepherd's axe (valaška), the weapon of Juraj Jánošík, the outlaw who in legend took from the rich and gave to the poor and was executed in 1713. 🧵 is the embroidery of the folk costume (kroj), different from region to region.

On Christmas Eve 🎄 supper starts with oplátky, thin wafers eaten with honey 🍯 and often a little garlic for health, then kapustnica and, in many homes, fried carp 🐟 with potato salad, before the presents 🎁. On the eve of 6 December Mikuláš fills the boots children have cleaned and set in the window, and comes with an angel 👼 and a devil 😈. Easter Monday is šibačka a oblievačka: boys visit girls with a braided willow whip (korbáč) and a bucket of water 🪣💦, and get painted eggs 🥚 (kraslice) and ribbons 🎀 tied to the whip in return. In spring a straw figure of Morena, the winter, is carried out of the village and burned 🔥 or thrown into a river.

🎆 marks 1 January twice: New Year and the birth of the Slovak Republic in 1993. 🔑🕯️ marks 17 November and the Velvet Revolution: Bratislava students protested on 16 November, and the first mass demonstration in SNP Square followed on 22 November. ✝️ belongs to 5 July, the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the missionaries from Byzantium who brought the first Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic, in 863. More than half of Slovaks are Roman Catholic, and the wooden churches ⛪ of the Carpathians in the east are on the UNESCO list.

Slovak sports, cars and famous names in emoji

Ice hockey 🏒 is the sport that stops the country. Slovakia won the World Championship in 2002 🏆🥇, beating Russia in the final in Gothenburg, and took Olympic bronze in 2022, so 🇸🇰🏒 fills comment sections whenever the national team plays. Football ⚽ had its great night at the 2010 World Cup, when Slovakia beat Italy 3–2 and reached the last sixteen. 🛶 is canoe slalom, where Michal Martikán, Elena Kaliská and the Hochschorner twins won Olympic gold after gold; 🚴 is Peter Sagan, road world champion three years running, 2015 to 2017; ⛷️ is Petra Vlhová, overall World Cup winner in 2021 and Olympic slalom champion in 2022; 🎾 is Dominika Cibulková and Daniela Hantuchová.

🚗 Slovakia builds more cars per person than any other country: Volkswagen in Bratislava, Kia near Žilina, Stellantis in Trnava and Jaguar Land Rover in Nitra make about a million a year. 🪂 Štefan Banič patented a parachute in the United States in 1914; 📻 the priest Jozef Murgaš took out early American patents for wireless telegraphy; 🔭 Milan Rastislav Štefánik was an astronomer before he became a general and one of the founders of Czechoslovakia. 🎨🥫 Andy Warhol's parents came from the village of Miková in north-eastern Slovakia, and nearby Medzilaborce has a museum of his work.