Switzerland Emoji

The Swiss flag emoji 🇨🇭 is a white cross on a red square. Switzerland and Vatican City are the only two countries with square national flags. Fans who want the colours as text use ❤️🤍, or build the flag themselves as 🟥➕ or with the heavy cross ✚, which is the nearest Unicode character to the Swiss cross; there is no separate Swiss cross symbol.

Like every country flag, 🇨🇭 is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 + 🇭, for the country code CH. It stands for Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name chosen so that none of the national languages is preferred; the same letters give the .ch domain and the currency code CHF. iPhone, Android and Mac draw the pair as a flag, while Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters CH instead.

⛑️ carries a white cross on red, and that link is real: the Red Cross was founded in Geneva in 1863, and its emblem is the Swiss flag with the colours reversed. 🏹🍎 is William Tell, the hero of the founding legend, who was forced to shoot an apple off his son's head in Altdorf. 🐻 is the bear of Bern, which has kept live bears for centuries, and 🐐 stands in for the Alpine ibex on the arms of Graubünden. The edelweiss, the best-loved Alpine flower, has no emoji of its own.

Switzerland emoji for food: cheese, fondue and chocolate

🧀 🫕 🍫 are the Switzerland emoji people reach for most often. The cheese wedge is usually drawn with holes, the look of Emmental, and the fondue emoji 🫕, added in 2020, shows the pot of melted cheese that people share with bread on long forks; a classic moitié-moitié fondue is half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois. There is no raclette emoji, so 🧀🥔 does the job: melted cheese scraped over boiled potatoes, a dish from the Valais.

Swiss chocolate 🍫 earned its name in the 19th century: Daniel Peter in Vevey pioneered milk chocolate in the 1870s, and Rodolphe Lindt in Bern invented conching, which made chocolate smooth. 🥔 is also Rösti, the crisp potato cake so tied to German-speaking Switzerland that the language border with the French-speaking west is jokingly called the Röstigraben, the Rösti ditch.

🥣 is muesli, created around 1900 by the Zurich doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner. 🥐 is the Gipfeli of every Swiss bakery and 🍞 the braided Sunday loaf Zopf. 🌭 stands for the Cervelat, often called the national sausage, and St. Gallen's veal bratwurst, 🥩 for Bündnerfleisch, the air-dried beef of Graubünden, and 🍰🍒 for the Zuger Kirschtorte soaked in cherry brandy. 🍷 covers the wines of the Valais and the terraced Lavaux vineyards above Lake Geneva, ☕ the Kafi or café crème of every station buffet.

Mountains, trains and lakes in emoji

🏔️ is the emoji of the Alps and above all the Matterhorn, 4,478 m, above Zermatt; the highest Swiss summit is the Dufourspitze at 4,634 m. ⛰️ 🌲 🏞️ cover the hiking country and the Swiss National Park, 🛖 the mountain huts, and 🐕 the St. Bernard dogs of the Great St. Bernard hospice, whose most famous dog, Barry, is said to have saved more than 40 people. 🐄🔔 are the cows and their big bells on the summer pastures.

Trains are part of the national identity. 🚆 is the punctual network of the SBB, 🚞 the mountain lines such as the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St. Moritz, a ride of about eight hours, and 🚠 🚡 the cable cars that climb almost every valley; the Jungfraujoch station at 3,454 m is the highest in Europe. 🚂 is the steam railways kept for summer trips, 🚊 the trams of Zurich, Basel, Bern and Geneva, and 📯 the yellow PostBus, whose three-note horn echoes round the hairpin bends.

On the lakes, ⛵ and ⛴️ are the sailing boats and paddle steamers of Lake Geneva and Lake Lucerne, and ⛲ the Jet d'Eau, Geneva's fountain about 140 m high. 🏰 is Chillon Castle on the shore near Montreux, 🌉 the covered wooden Chapel Bridge in Lucerne, 🦁 the Lion Monument in the same city, carved for the Swiss Guards who died in Paris in 1792, and 🏛️ the Federal Palace in Bern.

Swiss holidays and the emoji people send

Swiss National Day on 1 August remembers the Federal Charter of 1291. It is 🇨🇭🎆🔥🏮: fireworks, bonfires lit on the hills and paper lanterns with the Swiss cross carried by children. Speeches and brunches on farms fill the day; the bonfires and the lanterns belong to the night.

Basler Fasnacht, the Basel carnival, starts at 4 a.m. on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, when every light in the old town goes out for the Morgestraich. Its emoji are 🎭🥁🪈: masks, drums and piccolos, played for three days. In April Zurich celebrates Sechseläuten ☃️🔥 by burning the Böögg, a snowman packed with fireworks; the faster its head explodes, the better the summer is said to be.

In autumn the Alpabzug or désalpe brings the herds down from the high pastures, the cows crowned with flowers and huge bells: 🐄🌼🔔. 🪗 is the Schwyzerörgeli, the small Swiss accordion of folk music; the alphorn and yodelling have no emoji yet. On 1 March children in the Engadine ring cowbells 🔔 to chase away the winter at Chalandamarz.

Switzerland emoji for sport and for Switzerland in the world

Winter sport is home ground: ⛷️ 🎿 🏂, 🛷 for the toboggans and bobsleighs developed in St. Moritz, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948, 🥌 curling and 🏒 ice hockey, the country's other great spectator sport after football ⚽. 🧗 🥾 🪂 cover climbing, hiking and paragliding over Interlaken. 🤼 is Schwingen, Swiss wrestling in a ring of sawdust, whose champion at the national festival wins a bull 🐂. 🎾 means Roger Federer, winner of 20 Grand Slam singles titles, and 🏅 Lausanne, home of the International Olympic Committee; FIFA sits in Zurich and UEFA in Nyon.

⌚ is “Swiss made”: the watchmakers of Geneva and the Jura, and ⏱️ the timing of races. 🔪 is the nearest emoji to the Swiss Army knife, a pocketknife whose first soldier model was supplied to the Swiss Army in 1891. 🏦 💰 🪙 stand for Swiss banking and the franc. 🕊️ is neutrality and Geneva, home of the Geneva Conventions and the UN office 🇺🇳, though Switzerland itself joined the United Nations only in 2002. 🗳️ is direct democracy, with national votes several times a year, and ⚛️ 🌐 are CERN near Geneva, where the World Wide Web was invented in 1989.

Swiss letters, quotation marks and the franc

Switzerland, home to over 9 million people, has four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. CLDR estimates that about 6.7 million people in the country use German, most of them speaking Swiss German dialects, about 3.5 million French and 1.3 million Italian, counting second-language speakers. So a Swiss keyboard needs Ä Ö Ü for German, É È À Ç Ê Œ for French and À È Ì Ò Ù for Italian, and Romansh also uses À È Ò Ù. Swiss Standard German has no ß: Swiss write Strasse and gross where Germany writes Straße and groß.

On the Swiss keyboard the keys next to P and L carry both languages: in the German layout they type ü ö ä, with Shift è é à; in the French layout it is the other way round. Capital umlauts need Caps Lock, and ç is Shift+4. Elsewhere use Alt codes on Windows (Ä 0196, ä 0228, Ö 0214, ö 0246, Ü 0220, ü 0252, é 0233, è 0232, à 0224, ç 0231, « 0171, » 0187), Option+U then the vowel for umlauts on a Mac, or long-press the letter on a phone.

All the national languages quote with guillemets: German-speaking Swiss write «Grüezi» with no spaces, French speakers often add a narrow space inside, « Bonjour », and ‹ › is the single form. Number grouping varies by language; French uses a nonbreaking space: 1 000 000. The Swiss franc has no currency sign: prices read CHF 12.50 or Fr. 12.50, with the code before the amount, and a round price is often written Fr. 5.– with a dash. ₣ is the old French franc sign and is not used in Switzerland. Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc too. For the full alphabets see the German, Swiss German, French and Italian letter collections.