Sudan Emoji & Symbols

🇸🇩 the Sudan flag is the first Sudan emoji: home, pride, a match of the national team, a message to family abroad. Its colours work as hearts too, ❤️🤍🖤💚, and since 2019 💙 has its own Sudanese meaning, explained below. There is no Sudan map emoji; 🌍, the globe showing Africa, is the nearest.

Unicode has no pyramid emoji, so 🔺 or △ stand in for Sudan's own pyramids, the steep, narrow tombs of the kings and queens of Kush at Meroë, Nuri and El-Kurru, usually next to 🐪 and 🏜️. ⛰️ is Jebel Barkal, the flat-topped sacred mountain near Karima, and 👑 the Kandake, the title of the ruling queens of Kush.

🌊 and 💙🤍 are the Nile: the Blue Nile from Ethiopia and the White Nile from the south meet at Khartoum, at the point called al-Mogran, and flow on north together. ⛵ 🌅 🌴 are the river at sunset with its sailing boats and date palms, 🐄 🐐 🐪 the herds of the plains, 🛺 the raksha, the three-wheeled taxi of Khartoum and Omdurman, and 👳 the white imma turban worn with the long white jalabiya.

Sudan flag emoji: copy and paste 🇸🇩, the old flag and the Palestine look-alike

The Sudan flag emoji is two regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇩, the country code SD, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so a Windows PC shows the same emoji as the letters SD. Copy it anyway: anyone reading on a phone sees the flag. On Discord type :flag_sd:.

The flag, red, white and black bands with a green triangle at the hoist, was adopted in 1970. Its colours are usually explained as red for the struggle and the martyrs, white for peace, black for Sudan itself, whose name comes from the Arabic bilad as-sudan, "land of the black people", and green for Islam and the land's prosperity. The first flag of independent Sudan, flown from 1956 to 1970, was a blue, yellow and green tricolour for the Nile, the desert and the farmland: there is no emoji for it, but 🟦🟨🟩 spells it out.

The Palestinian flag 🇵🇸 uses the same four colours the other way round: horizontal black, white and green bands with a red triangle. Sudan's has red on top and a green triangle. 🇸🇸 is South Sudan, a separate country since 9 July 2011 with its own flag and its own collection. Sudan's national day is Independence Day, 1 January, marking independence in 1956: 🇸🇩🎆🎉.

Blue for Sudan 💙 and Sudan's symbols of resistance

In December 2018 protests began across Sudan, and in April 2019 they ended the thirty-year rule of Omar al-Bashir. On 3 June 2019 security forces broke up the sit-in outside the army headquarters in Khartoum; among those killed was Mohamed Hashim Mattar, whose favourite colour was blue. His friends turned their profile pictures blue in his memory, and within days thousands of people around the world did the same under #BlueForSudan. Since then 💙, 💙🇸🇩 and a plain blue profile picture mean solidarity with the people of Sudan.

The revolution's chant was Hurriya, salam wa adala, حرية سلام وعدالة, "freedom, peace and justice", and its shortest slogan Tasgut bas, تسقط بس, "just fall, that's all". Its best-known image is a young woman in a white toub standing on a car roof leading a song, called Kandaka after the queens of Kush; the word became a name of honour for the women who led the protests. ✊ and ✌️ are the protest emoji, 👑 the Kandaka.

Since April 2023 Sudan has been torn by war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, and millions have fled their homes. People share 🕊️🇸🇩 for peace, 🙏🇸🇩 to pray for Sudan, and 💙 to keep the country in view.

Ancient Sudan: the pyramids of Meroë and Meroitic hieroglyphs

Northern Sudan was Kush, the land the Egyptians called Ta-Seti, "land of the bow". In the eighth century BC its kings conquered Egypt and ruled it as the 25th Dynasty, the "Black Pharaohs"; one of them, Taharqa, appears in the Bible as Tirhakah. Back home they revived pyramid building, and Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt, over two hundred, smaller and much steeper than those of Giza. The royal cemeteries of Meroë and the temples of Jebel Barkal are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Kush wrote its own language, Meroitic, in two scripts: a cursive for everyday writing and a hieroglyphic form, with signs borrowed from Egyptian, for temples and royal monuments. Both came to Unicode in version 6.1 in 2012. The grid holds the hieroglyphic set: 23 sounds plus second forms of several. It is close to an alphabet: each consonant sign is read with an a unless a sign for e, i or o follows it. The British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith deciphered the script in 1911, so Meroitic can be read aloud, but the language itself is still only partly understood.

If the hieroglyphs 𐦀 𐦉 𐦎 show as empty boxes, the device lacks the font; the free Noto Sans Meroitic fixes it. Medieval Christian Nubia then wrote Old Nubian in the Coptic alphabet with three extra letters taken from Meroitic, the ancestor of today's Nobiin; see our Nobiin collection.

Sudanese food, coffee, holidays and football emoji

The everyday meal is 🫘 ful, stewed fava beans, eaten with bread 🫓 or kisra, a thin fermented sorghum crepe, and 🧆 ta'amiya. 🥣 is asida, a stiff sorghum or wheat porridge, served with 🍲 mullah, the stews poured over it. 🍖 is shaiya, grilled meat, 🍆🥜 an eggplant salad with peanut paste, and 🥭🍉 the summer fruit of Kassala and the Nile farms.

Coffee ☕ is made in the jabana, a round clay pot with a long neck 🫖, and spiced with ginger 🫚, often served by a sitt al-shai, one of the tea ladies whose stools and charcoal stoves line Khartoum's streets and riverbanks. Tea comes sweet, with mint 🌿 or milk 🥛, and 🌺 is karkadeh, the deep red hibiscus drink, drunk hot or iced.

In Ramadan 🌙 ☪️ 🕌 🤲 come with hilu-mur, "sweet-bitter", a spiced sorghum drink families prepare weeks ahead for breaking the fast. 📿 stands for the Sufi orders, whose Friday dhikr at the tomb of Hamed al-Nil in Omdurman, with drums and patched green-and-red robes, draws crowds every week. Eid al-Fitr means home-baked biscuits 🍪, Eid al-Adha the sheep 🐑, and the Prophet's birthday, the Mawlid, the sweets 🍬 sold in tents across the cities. Weddings run on the daluka drum 🥁🪘, singing and dancing 💃; 🎤 stands for singers like Mohammed Wardi.

⚽ rules sport. The national team, the Falcons of Jediane, won the Africa Cup of Nations at home in Khartoum in 1970 🏆, and Sudan was one of the four founders of African football's confederation in 1957. The big derby is in Omdurman: 🔵 Al-Hilal against 🔴 Al-Merrikh.

Sudanese pound symbol, Arabic letters and the languages of Sudan

The Sudanese pound has no dedicated symbol. CLDR formats it as SDG in Latin locales and ج.س. (jineh sudani) in Arabic; one pound is 100 piastres (qirsh). For the generic £ sign on Windows hold Alt and type 0163 on the number pad, on a US Mac press Option + 3; in HTML it is £.

Sudan has about 50 million people by CLDR's estimate, and CLDR lists the functional population for Arabic in Sudan at about 31 million; English is the second official language. Sudanese write Arabic with the same 28 letters as other Arabic speakers, right to left, but read some their own way: ق qaf is a hard g, so "he said", قال, is gaal, and ج is a soft j. Sudan itself is السودان, as-Sudan. Arabic text has its own comma ،, question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛, and the Eastern Arabic digits ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ appear on banknotes and signs next to 0–9.

To type Arabic, add the Arabic (Sudan) keyboard in Windows Settings under Time & language and switch with Win + Space, add Arabic under Keyboard input sources on a Mac, or add an Arabic keyboard on your phone. Sudan also speaks many languages of its own. CLDR estimates the populations functionally able to use Beja by the Red Sea at about 2.7 million, Fur in Darfur at about 1.4 million, Masalit at about 500,000, Nobiin along the Nile in the far north at about 420,000 and Zaghawa at about 260,000. Sudan's Hausa speakers write their language in Arabic script. See our Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Beja, Fur, Masalit, Nobiin and Zaghawa collections.