Syria Emoji

🇸🇾 the Syria flag emoji is not a picture stored in Unicode but two invisible regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇾, for Syria's country code SY. Unicode only says "the flag of SY"; what it looks like is up to whoever draws the emoji font, Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or apps with their own emoji such as WhatsApp and X. That is why the emoji could change without any new character being added, and why people search for the "new", "green" and "old" Syria flag emoji.

On 8 December 2024 the government of Bashar al-Assad fell, and the green, white and black flag with three red stars became Syria's national flag. It is not a new design: it is the flag of Syria's independence era, dating from the 1930s under the French mandate and flown when the last French troops left in 1946, and from 2011 it was the flag of the uprising. The flag it replaced, red, white and black with two green stars, goes back to Syria's union with Egypt in 1958 and was readopted in 1980. Emoji fonts have been redrawing 🇸🇾 platform by platform since, so the same two letters can arrive as the green flag on one phone and the red one on another until both are updated. There is nothing separate to copy: 🇸🇾 is the only Syria flag emoji, and an update to your phone's system or app is what changes the picture.

Where the picture is out of date, or on Windows, which shows the letters SY instead of flags, people draw the flag themselves: 💚🤍🖤 with ❤️❤️❤️ or ⭐⭐⭐ for the stars, or 🟩⬜⬛ in rows. A green heart 💚 next to 🇸🇾 has become a quick way to say which flag you mean. 🌹 is the Damask rose, 🦅 the eagle that in one form or another has long stood on Syria's state emblem, and 🕊️ the dove people add with wishes for peace.

Syrian pound symbol: ل.س., £S and SYP

The Syrian pound, which Syrians call the lira (ليرة), has no currency sign of its own in Unicode. In Arabic it is written ل.س., short for ليرة سورية (Syrian lira): copy ل and س from the grid and add a full stop after each; because Arabic runs right to left, the abbreviation reads from the right. In Latin letters you see £S, built from the pound sign £ in the grid, or LS from the French livre syrienne, and banks use the code SYP.

Since the war began in 2011 the pound has lost most of its value, and larger prices, rents and remittances are often talked about in US dollars, which is why 💵 sits next to it here; 💰 is the general money emoji.

Arabic, Kurdish and Syriac: the letters Syrians write

Arabic is Syria's official language. By CLDR's estimates about 20 million of the country's roughly 24 million people speak Levantine Arabic at home; the Damascus variety, Shami, is understood across the Arab world thanks to Syrian television dramas and the Turkish series dubbed into it. Syrians write Modern Standard Arabic in the Arabic script: 28 letters written right to left; most join cursively to neighbouring letters and change shape with their joining context, while six letters do not join to the next letter. The grid groups them by shape: ب ت ث share one body and differ only in their dots, and so do ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ. Paste س و ر ي ا one after another and they join into سوريا, Syria; official texts often spell it سورية, ending in ة (ta marbuta). Damascus is دمشق, but Syrians usually call it الشام, ash-Sham.

In chats many Syrians write Arabic in Latin letters, called Arabizi, with digits for the sounds English lacks: 3 for ع (ya3ni, "I mean"), 7 for ح (7abibi) and 2 for the glottal stop that city Syrians say where standard Arabic has qaf (2albi, "my heart"). To type real Arabic, add the Arabic keyboard on Windows under Settings › Time & language › Language & region and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add Arabic under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on phones add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. The comma ، is upside down, the question mark ؟ is mirrored and the semicolon is ؛. Eastern Arabic digits ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ appear on banknotes and in print; a number is still written left to right, so ١٧ is 17.

Kurdish, spoken by an estimated 1.9 million people in the north and northeast, is written in Syria in either Latin or modified Arabic script; the Hawar alphabet, a Latin orthography for Kurmanji, was published by Celadet Alî Bedirxan in his magazine Hawar in Damascus from 1932. Beyond A–Z it adds five letters, each right after its base letter: ç (ch), ê (a long e), î (a long ee, while plain i is short), ş (sh) and û (a long oo), as in Newroz pîroz be, Happy Nowruz. On Windows type Alt+0231 for ç, Alt+0234 ê, Alt+0238 î and Alt+0251 û (Alt+0199, 0202, 0206, 0219 for capitals); ş has no Alt+0 code, so use a Kurdish or Turkish keyboard or the HTML entity ş. On phones, long-press c, e, i and u, or add a Kurdish (Kurmanji) keyboard.

The Syriac alphabet of 22 letters, ܐ alaph, ܒ beth, ܓ gamal to ܬ taw, is the script of Syria's Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic Christians; the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch has had his seat in Damascus since 1959. ♰ is the West Syriac cross of those churches and ♱ the East Syriac cross of the Assyrian villages on the Khabur river. In Maaloula and nearby villages north of Damascus people still speak Western Neo-Aramaic, a living descendant of the language of Jesus' time. CLDR estimates about 1.4 million French speakers and some 430,000 Armenian speakers, many in Aleppo; Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Kurdish, French, Armenian and Syriac each have their own collection.

Ugaritic: the alphabet from Ugarit 𐎀𐎁𐎂

In 1928 a farmer ploughing near Ras Shamra, just north of Latakia, broke into an ancient tomb, and the excavations that followed uncovered Ugarit, a trading city destroyed around 1185 BC. Its scribes wrote with wedges pressed into clay like Mesopotamian cuneiform, but with 30 signs for some 27 consonants: an alphabet. Small tablets found there list the letters in a fixed order, 𐎀 𐎁 𐎂 𐎃 𐎄 (a, b, g, ḫ, d…), the oldest known abecedaries, and that order is essentially the one the Phoenician alphabet and later the Greek and Latin alphabets kept: a, b, g, d. Three of the signs, 𐎀 𐎛 𐎜, are the same glottal stop with different vowels, a, i and u.

Ugaritic has been in Unicode since version 4.0 (2003), so you can copy the letters from the grid; unlike Arabic and Syriac it is written left to right, and 𐎟 is the small vertical wedge used between words. The letters only show if your device has a font for them, such as Noto Sans Ugaritic; otherwise you see empty boxes.

Syrian food emoji: fatteh, kibbeh and Bakdash ice cream

A Damascus weekend breakfast is fatteh 🫘🫓🥛: chickpeas over toasted bread under yoghurt and tahini, topped with pine nuts and hot ghee, or foul, fava beans with lemon and olive oil. Street food is shawarma 🥙 and falafel 🧆 in thin bread 🫓. The mezze table brings hummus 🫘, tabbouleh and fattoush 🥗🍋🌿, olives 🫒, baba ghanoush and makdous 🍆, small aubergines cured in oil and stuffed with walnuts and red pepper, muhammara 🌶️, the Aleppo dip of roasted red pepper, walnuts and pomegranate molasses, toum 🧄 and shanklish 🧀, aged cheese rolled in za'atar. Aleppo is known for kibbeh 🥩 in dozens of forms, and for kebab with cherries; 🍇 stands for yabraq, vine leaves rolled around rice.

Sweets come soaked in syrup and covered in pistachios 🍯🥜; in Syrian Arabic a pistachio is fustuq halabi, "Aleppo nut". 🍪 is barazek, thin sesame and pistachio cookies, and ma'amoul for Eid and Easter. 🍨 means Bakdash, the ice-cream parlour in the Hamidiyah souq that has served booza for more than a century, stretchy with mastic and salep, pounded by hand and rolled in pistachios.

Coffee ☕ is strong and spiced with cardamom, tea 🫖 is drunk all day, ayran 🥛 comes with grills and 🥃 is arak, the aniseed spirit that turns milky with water. And 🧉 is no mistake: emigrants returning from Argentina brought yerba mate home, it is drunk every day in Qalamoun, Sweida and the coastal mountains, and Syria imports more of it than any country outside South America.

Places, crafts, faith and holidays in Syria emoji

Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, is 🕌 the Umayyad Mosque, built in the early 8th century, 🛍️ the covered Hamidiyah souq, ⛲ the courtyard fountains of its old houses with lemon trees and jasmine, and ⛰️ Mount Qasioun, where people go to look at the city lights. 🏰 is the Citadel of Aleppo and Krak des Chevaliers, the Crusader castle near Homs, 🏛️ the colonnades of Palmyra and the Roman theatre of Bosra, 🏺 Ugarit. 🏖️⛵ is the coast at Latakia and Tartus and the island of Arwad, 🌊 the Euphrates, 🏜️🐪 the desert steppe. Many of these places were damaged in the war after 2011, and their repair is followed closely by Syrians at home and abroad.

🧼 is Aleppo soap, made from olive and laurel oil and aged for months; 🗡️ Damascus steel; 🧵🪡 damask, the patterned fabric named after the city, and its brocade. 📖🗣️ is the hakawati, the storyteller who still performs at the Al-Nawfara café behind the Umayyad Mosque, 🎲 backgammon in the cafés and 📺 the Syrian TV series families watch every evening of Ramadan. 🎤🎶 is for singers such as Sabah Fakhri and Aleppo's qudud songs; 🪘💃🕺🧑‍🤝‍🧑 is dabke, the line dance at every party, and 💍⚔️ the arada of Damascene weddings, where a troupe chants and clashes swords and shields as the groom arrives. 🐎 is the Arabian horse, 🐑 the sheep of the steppe, and 🐹 the golden hamster, also called the Syrian hamster.

Mosques and churches stand side by side in Syria's old cities: ☪️ and 📿 for Muslims, ⛪ ✝️ ☦️ and 🕯️ for the Orthodox, Catholic and Syriac churches. Ramadan brings 🌙🏮, the drummer who walks the streets before dawn to wake people for suhoor, and رمضان كريم; Eid al-Adha brings 🐑 and عيد مبارك. Christians celebrate Christmas 🎄 and Easter 🥚, and on the Feast of the Cross in mid-September bonfires 🔥 burn on the mountainsides of Maaloula; on 21 March Kurds light 🔥 for Nowruz, the same day as Mother's Day 💐 in the Arab world. Evacuation Day, 17 April, marks the departure of the last French troops in 1946 with 🇸🇾🎆. In sport, the national football team ⚽ is nicknamed the Qasioun Eagles, basketball 🏀 has a big following, Ghada Shouaa won Syria's first Olympic gold 🥇 in the heptathlon at Atlanta 1996, and weightlifter Man Asaad 🏋️ took bronze in Tokyo.