Sri Lanka Emoji

🇱🇰 the Sri Lanka flag emoji is not a picture stored in your text. It is two invisible regional indicator letters, 🇱 and 🇰, for the country code LK, which phones and Macs join into a flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters LK instead; the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone.

The flag is called the lion flag (සිංහ කොඩිය, sinha kodiya). On a maroon panel a gold lion 🦁 holds a sword 🗡️ in its raised right forepaw, with a bo leaf 🍃 in each corner, and at the hoist side stand a green and a saffron stripe, all inside a yellow border. The lion banner goes back to the kings of Kandy, and the lion is in the name of the Sinhala people themselves: sinha means lion. The green and saffron stripes, added in the early 1950s, stand for the Muslim and Tamil communities. The four leaves, added in 1972, are leaves of the bo tree, the fig under which the Buddha reached enlightenment, and stand for four Buddhist virtues: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.

Where the flag emoji does not show, Sri Lankans draw it as 🟩🟧🟥🦁, and they pair 🇱🇰 with 🦁 for the country, the cricket team and the people. National Day is 4 February, the day in 1948 when the island, then called Ceylon, became independent from Britain; it took the name Sri Lanka in 1972. In Sinhala the country is ශ්‍රී ලංකාව and in Tamil இலங்கை (Ilankai).

Sri Lankan food emoji: Ceylon tea, rice and curry, hoppers and kottu

🫖🍵☕ Ceylon tea kept the island's old name. Tea has been grown commercially in the hill country since James Taylor planted it at Loolecondera near Kandy in 1867, and estates around Nuwara Eliya, Dimbula and Uva still cover the green slopes. At home tea comes plain, with sugar, or as kiri tea, milk tea, and a guest is offered a cup before anything else. 🍃 doubles as a tea leaf and the bo leaf of the flag.

🍛 rice and curry is the everyday meal: a plate of rice 🍚 with several curries around it, almost always dhal (parippu) 🫘, often a fish curry 🐟 such as sour ambul thiyal, and pol sambol, fresh-grated coconut 🥥 pounded with chilli 🌶️, onion and lime. Jaffna is famous for its crab curry 🦀, and isso vadai, lentil fritters topped with whole prawns 🦐, are fried at stalls along Galle Face Green. 🌿 can stand for the spices the island traded for centuries, above all true cinnamon, which grows wild in Sri Lanka and is still sold as Ceylon cinnamon.

There are no emoji for hoppers or kottu, so people improvise. Hoppers (appa) are bowl-shaped crispy pancakes of fermented rice flour and coconut milk, and an egg hopper has an egg 🥚 cooked in the middle. 🫓 is roti: pol roti with coconut, and godamba roti, which is chopped on a hot griddle with vegetables, egg and meat into kottu, to the clatter of the cook's metal blades. For dessert there is 🍮 watalappan, a steamed custard of coconut milk, jaggery, eggs and cardamom that came with the island's Malays, and buffalo curd 🥛 served in clay pots with kithul treacle 🍯, the syrup of the kithul palm. King coconut 🥥 (thambili), bananas 🍌, mangoes 🥭 and pineapples 🍍 are sold at every roadside.

Vesak, Avurudu and Perahera: Sri Lanka holiday emoji

Every full moon 🌕 is a Poya day and a public holiday, when Buddhists dressed in white go to the temple. The greatest is Vesak, the full moon of May, which marks the birth, enlightenment and passing of the Buddha. Homes and streets fill with lanterns 🏮 (Vesak kudu) of bamboo and paper, clay oil lamps 🪔 are lit, huge illuminated pandals (thorana) tell stories from the Buddha's past lives, and roadside dansal hand out free food and drinks to anyone passing. People send සුබ වෙසක් (Suba Vesak, Happy Vesak) with 🏮🪷☸️. 🛓 is the Unicode stupa, the shape of the white dagobas of Anuradhapura and Kandy; it is a symbol rather than a colour emoji, so it shows in your font's text style.

Avurudu, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, falls on 13–14 April, when the sun moves into Aries. Families follow auspicious times set by astrologers: the hearth is lit, a pot of milk is boiled until it overflows, and the first meal is kiribath 🍚, rice cooked in coconut milk, with kavum and kokis. Firecrackers 🧨 go off across the island at the moment the new year begins, women play the big round raban drum 🥁, and villages hold games, from pillow fights on a pole to the Avurudu kumari pageant, in new clothes 🥻. The greeting is සුබ අලුත් අවුරුද්දක් වේවා (Suba aluth avuruddak wewa) in Sinhala and இனிய புத்தாண்டு வாழ்த்துக்கள் (Iniya puthandu vazhthukkal) in Tamil.

In July or August the Esala Perahera in Kandy parades the relic casket, a substitute for the Sacred Tooth Relic, through the city at night on the back of a great tusker 🐘, with dozens of decorated elephants, Kandyan dancers, drummers 🥁, whip-crackers and fire dancers 🔥; 🐘🥁🔥 is its combo. Hindus mark Thai Pongal in January and Deepavali with 🛕🕉️🪔, Muslims celebrate Ramazan and Hajj festivals with 🌙🕌, and Christmas ⛪ is a public holiday too.

Sri Lankan rupee symbol: ₨, Rs, රු and ரூ

The Sri Lankan rupee (code LKR) is divided into 100 cents. It has no currency sign of its own: prices are written Rs., as in Rs. 500, and on bills you often see Rs. 500/=. The single character ₨, Unicode U+20A8 RUPEE SIGN, is the Rs ligature and is the closest thing to a symbol; in Microsoft Word type 20A8 and press Alt+X, in HTML write ₨, or copy it from this page. ₹ is India's rupee sign and does not stand for the Sri Lankan rupee.

Sinhala writes the abbreviation as රු (ru, from රුපියල්, rupiyal) and Tamil as ரூ (rū, from ரூபாய், rūpāy).

Sinhala letters and Tamil letters to copy and paste

Sri Lanka has two official languages, Sinhala and Tamil, and English is the link language between them. By CLDR estimates about 15 million people in Sri Lanka speak Sinhala, over 3 million Tamil and about 2 million English; each has its own collection here, Sinhala, Tamil and English, and Tamil's is shared with India, where most Tamil speakers live.

Sinhala has a script of its own, used for Sinhala and for Pali scripture. Like the Indian scripts it is an abugida: every consonant carries a built-in a (ක is ka), vowel signs called pilla attach to it to change the vowel (කා kā, කි ki), and the al-lakuna ් strips the vowel away (ක් k). The letters are round, which is usually explained by centuries of writing on palm leaves, where straight lines would split the leaf. The full alphabet, the hodiya, has the vowels from අ to ඖ, the signs ං (ṃ) and ඃ (ḥ) and the consonants from ක to ෆ; many aspirated letters such as ඛ and ඝ are used mostly in words from Pali and Sanskrit, and ෆ (fa) was added for borrowed words. Sinhala's own are the prenasalised letters ඟ ඬ ඳ ඹ, which blend a short nasal into the next sound, as in හඳ (handa, moon). Some joined forms are typed with an invisible zero-width joiner after the al-lakuna, which is how ශ්‍රී (śrī) is built, so copy whole words rather than single letters when you need them. ෴, the kunddaliya, is an old punctuation mark that closed a passage; you meet it in older texts and in design rather than in everyday writing.

Tamil has 12 vowels (உயிர், uyir), 18 consonants (மெய், mei) and the special letter ஃ (aytham). The consonants fall into hard, soft and medium classes, each hard letter with its nasal partner: க and ங, ச and ஞ, ட and ண, த and ந, ப and ம, ற and ன. ழ, the retroflex ḻ heard at the end of தமிழ் (Tamil), is the letter Tamils are proudest of, and the four common Grantha letters ஜ ஷ ஸ ஹ write sounds from Sanskrit and English; the rarer ஶ appears in ஶ்ரீ. Sri Lankan Tamil is spoken in Jaffna and the north, in the east, in the hill country and in Colombo.

To type them, add the Sinhala or Tamil keyboard in Windows settings or on your phone (Gboard on Android has both). Many Sri Lankans type Sinhala phonetically, writing ayubowan in Latin letters and letting an app such as Helakuru turn it into ආයුබෝවන්.

Cricket, elephants and beaches: more Sri Lanka emoji

🏏 cricket is the country's passion. Sri Lanka won the 1996 World Cup, beating Australia in the final in Lahore 🏆, and the T20 World Cup in 2014, and the team is known as the Lions 🦁. In the stands, papare bands 🎺🥁 play through the whole match, and fans shout ජයවේවා (jayawewa, victory). Volleyball 🏐, though, is the official national sport, and the surf at Arugam Bay 🏄 draws boarders from around the world.

Sri Lanka is one of the best places in Asia to see wild elephants 🐘: in the dry season hundreds gather at the reservoir of Minneriya. Yala and Wilpattu are known for leopards 🐆 and sloth bears 🐻, blue whales 🐋 pass close to Mirissa, sea turtles 🐢 nest on the southern beaches, and peacocks 🦚, crocodiles 🐊, monkeys 🐒 and water buffalo 🐃 wallowing in the paddy fields 🌾 are everyday sights. The national flower is the blue water lily, nil manel, for which 🪷 is the nearest emoji; the national bird is the Sri Lanka junglefowl 🐓 and the national butterfly the Sri Lankan birdwing 🦋.

For places: 🪨 is Sigiriya, the rock fortress of King Kashyapa, whose gateway is a pair of giant stone lion's paws; ⛰️🌄 is Adam's Peak (Sri Pada), climbed by night to watch the sunrise from the summit; 🚂🌉 is the hill-country railway to Ella and its Nine Arch Bridge; 🏖️🌴🌊 the south and east coasts; 🛺 the tuk-tuk, the island's three-wheeler taxi; 💎 Ratnapura, the city of gems, famous for its sapphires; and 🪁 the kites flown at sunset on Galle Face Green in Colombo.