Somalia Emoji & Symbols

The Somalia flag emoji 🇸🇴 is one of the simplest flags there is: a single white five-pointed star in the middle of a light blue field. The star is the Star of Unity, and its five points stand for the five lands where Somalis live: the former Italian and British Somalilands, which joined to form today's Somalia, French Somaliland (now Djibouti), the Ogaden in Ethiopia and the north-east of Kenya. The light blue is often said to honour the United Nations, which oversaw the southern territory on its way to independence; it is also read as the sky and the sea. The flag was first adopted on 12 October 1954 during the UN Trusteeship; it became Somalia's national flag on 1 July 1960.

People spell the flag out as 🩵⭐, 💙🤍 or 🟦⬜, and the star travels on its own as ⭐, ★ or ☆. On the national coat of arms the star sits on a blue shield held up by two leopards 🐆, standing on crossed spears with palm leaves.

Behind the scenes 🇸🇴 is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇴, spelling the country code SO. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters SO instead, though a friend on a phone still sees the flag. That is also why people ask "what flag is this 🇸🇴": it is Somalia, not to be confused with 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia, which uses the codes S and A.

Somalia Independence Day, 1 July, Ramadan and Eid

Somalia has two independence days five days apart. British Somaliland in the north became independent on 26 June 1960, and on 1 July 1960 it united with the former Italian-run territory in the south to form the Somali Republic. The first of July is the big national day, and Somalis everywhere, from Mogadishu to Minneapolis, fill their posts with 🇸🇴🎆🎉 and the flag's blue and white 🩵🤍.

Almost all Somalis are Sunni Muslims, so the year also turns around Ramadan 🌙, Eid al-Fitr at its end and Eid al-Adha, when families share a sacrificed sheep or goat 🐑🐐. Ciid Mubaarak ☪️🤲 is the Somali spelling of the Eid greeting, 🕌📿 go with prayers and Friday at the mosque, and 🕋 is for those making the Hajj to Mecca.

Somali food emoji: rice, banana, pasta and tea

Ask anyone about Somali food and the first thing they mention is the banana 🍌. The everyday feast is bariis iskukaris, rice cooked with cardamom, cumin and cloves 🍚, served with goat, lamb or camel meat 🍖, and a whole banana is eaten alongside, bite for bite. Bananas were once the country's great export crop, and mangoes 🥭 grow along the same southern rivers. Thanks to the Italian years, pasta 🍝, called baasto, is just as much at home, often with a meat sauce and, again, a banana.

Breakfast is canjeero, also called laxoox, a thin, spongy, slightly sour pancake-bread 🫓🥞, eaten with sugar and ghee, honey or stew. Suqaar is small cubes of meat quickly fried with onion and pepper 🥩, maraq is the soup or stew 🍲 that comes with almost everything, and the hot sauce basbaas 🌶️ sits on the table. In Ramadan the fast is broken with dates 🌴 and crisp triangular sambuusa filled with spiced meat 🥟.

Shaah, sweet milky tea spiced with cardamom and cinnamon 🫖🍵, is drunk all day, coffee ☕ comes out for guests, and camel milk 🐪🥛 is a staple of nomadic life. At weddings and Eid you will also be offered xalwo, a glossy, sticky sweet cut into squares.

Camels, frankincense and the longest coast in Africa

Somalia keeps one of the largest camel herds in the world, often said to be the largest, and the camel 🐪 is at the heart of Somali poetry, wealth and everyday life. Nomadic families move with their camels, goats and sheep 🐐🐑, and cattle 🐄 in the south, carrying their home with them: the aqal, a domed hut of bent branches covered with woven mats, which is what 🛖 stands for here. The land is dry savanna and semi-desert 🏜️☀️, rising to the mountains ⛰️ of the north.

The north-east is one of the world's main sources of frankincense, the scented resin tapped from small, tough Boswellia trees 🌳 that grow on rocky slopes; some historians place the ancient Land of Punt, where Egyptian expeditions went for incense and myrrh, along this coast (its exact location is still debated), and the region of Puntland is named after it. Near Hargeisa in the north-west, the rock shelters of Laas Geel 🪨 hold painted cattle and people thought to be several thousand years old, among the best-preserved rock art in Africa.

Somalia has the longest coastline of mainland Africa, more than 3,000 kilometres along the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean 🌊. Fishermen bring in tuna, shark and spiny lobster 🐟🦈🦞, wooden boats ⛵ and cargo ships 🚢⚓ use the old ports of Berbera, Bosaso, Mogadishu and Kismayo, and Mogadishu itself 🏙️ is an old trading city that the traveller Ibn Battuta described in 1331. On a Friday afternoon, Lido Beach 🏖️ in Mogadishu is full of families, swimmers and boys playing football on the sand.

A nation of poets: poetry, music, dress and sport

Somalia is often called a nation of poets. For centuries news, arguments and love were carried in memorised verse, and a great poem could be recited across the country long before Somali had an official writing system, adopted in 1972: 📜🎤. Poets such as Hadraawi are household names, and songs 🎶 and the clapping, drumming folk dance dhaanto 🥁💃 fill weddings and national days.

Women typically wear the dirac, a long, light, flowing dress, with a headscarf or a garbasaar shawl 👗🧕; men wear the macawis, a wrapped sarong, often with a koofiyad cap.

Football ⚽ is the most popular sport, and the national team is nicknamed the Ocean Stars. On the track 🏃, Abdi Bile became world champion over 1500 metres in 1987, and Mo Farah, born in Somalia, went on to win four Olympic golds 🥇 for Britain.

Somali letters, the Osmanya script and the Somali shilling

Somalia's government estimates its population at 19.1 million and lists Somali and Arabic as its official languages; small Swahili-speaking communities live on the southern coast around Barawa, and some Oromo is spoken too. Somali has been officially written in the Latin alphabet since 21 October 1972, and it needs no accents at all: every letter is on an ordinary keyboard. Some letters simply work differently. C is the deep throat sound of Arabic ع, X is the breathy ħ of Arabic ح, Q is a sound made far back in the throat, DH is a d made with the tongue curled back, and KH and SH are as in Arabic loans and English "ship". Long vowels are doubled, so Soomaaliya is Somalia, and an apostrophe marks a catch in the voice, as in ba'. The Somali and Arabic collections cover those languages in full.

Before 1972 several scripts competed, and the best known is Osmanya, invented around 1920 by Cismaan Yuusuf Keenadiid. It is written left to right, has its own letters for every consonant and vowel, including long 𐒛 aa, 𐒜 ee and 𐒝 oo, and its own digits 𐒠 𐒡 𐒢. The word Soomaali in Osmanya is 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘. Osmanya has been in Unicode since version 4.0 in 2003 (U+10480 to U+104AF), so it pastes like any other text; many up-to-date phones and computers display it, and the free Noto Sans Osmanya font fills the gap where they do not. Arabic text runs right to left and has its own comma ، and question mark ؟.

The currency is the Somali shilling, code SOS. It has no Unicode sign of its own; prices are written Sh.So. or simply in shillings, and Somaliland in the north-west uses its own Somaliland shilling. In practice US dollars 💵 and mobile money 📱💸 carry most payments: services such as EVC Plus let people pay for tea, taxis and rent from a basic phone, and Somalia has one of the highest rates of mobile-money use in the world. Money sent home by Somalis abroad ✈️💸 keeps many families going.