Togo Emoji

🇹🇬 the Togo flag emoji shows five horizontal stripes, three green and two yellow, with a red square in the upper corner by the pole and a white five-pointed star inside it. The Togo flag emoji is not a picture in the text but a pair of regional indicator letters, 🇹 and 🇬, for Togo's country code TG, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you'll see the letters TG, while the person you send it to still sees the flag on their phone. "Togolese flag emoji" is the same 🇹🇬.

The flag was designed by the Togolese artist Paul Ahyi and first raised on 27 April 1960, the day Togo became independent from France. The five stripes are usually said to stand for the country's five regions, green for hope and the land that feeds it, yellow for faith in work and the riches of the soil, red for the blood shed for independence and the white star for peace and purity. Togo's constitution gives no fixed flag ratio, and references vary, citing 3:5, 2:3 or the golden ratio (about 1 to 1.618), which is why people search for "Togo flag ratio". Where flags don't show, people write 💚💛❤️🤍 or 🟩🟨🟥⭐.

Benin 🇧🇯, Togo's eastern neighbour, flies the same green, yellow and red, so "Benin and Togo flag emoji" are easy to confuse: Benin has one green band at the pole and two wide stripes, yellow over red, and no star. Ghana 🇬🇭 on the west has red, gold and green stripes with a black star. 🇹🇬🤝🇬🇭 and 🇹🇬🤝🇧🇯 are the usual greetings across the borders.

Togo national symbols: the lions, the motto and Terre de nos aïeux

Togo's coat of arms has two lions 🦁 standing on either side of a shield with the letters RT, for République Togolaise, each holding a bow and arrow 🏹; two national flags fly above them and a ribbon carries the motto Travail, Liberté, Patrie, work, liberty, homeland. The lion is often given as Togo's national animal, and 🦁🇹🇬 is an easy way to write it. The national anthem is Terre de nos aïeux, land of our forefathers.

The country took its name from the town of Togo on the shore of Lake Togo, today's Togoville, where the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal signed a protectorate treaty in 1884. German Togoland was split between Britain and France after the First World War; the British part voted to join Ghana in 1956, and the French part became the independent Republic of Togo in 1960. That is why Ewe people live on both sides of the Ghana border and why Togo speaks French.

A note for people searching "adinkra symbols Togo": Adinkra are the printed symbols of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, not of Togo, and Unicode has no characters for them. They turn up in Togo on imported cloth, but you'll find them in the Ghana collection.

Independence Day, Evala and other Togo holidays in emoji

Independence Day on 27 April is 🇹🇬🎉🎆 with "Bonne fête de l'indépendance" and a parade in Lomé. Togo has Christians, Muslims and many people who follow the traditional Vodun religion of the Ewe and their neighbours, often alongside a church or mosque, so Christmas 🎄⛪ and Tabaski 🐏🌙🕌, as Eid al-Adha is called in West Africa, are both national holidays, "Joyeux Noël" and "Bonne fête de Tabaski". 🙏 closes prayers in every faith.

In July the Kara region in the north holds Evala, the wrestling of the Kabye, in which young men prove themselves in bouts watched by whole villages; 🤼 is the emoji, and 🤼🇹🇬 the caption. In September the Ewe gather at Notsé for Agbogbozã, which remembers their ancestors' escape from the walled town of the harsh King Agokoli, with chiefs in kente and gold 👑 and drums 🥁🪘. The Guin people of Aného welcome their new year at Glidji with Epe Ekpe, when priests bring out a sacred stone 🪨 whose colour is read as a sign for the year ahead.

CFA franc symbol: how to write Togo's currency

Togo pays in the West African CFA franc, ISO code XOF, issued by the BCEAO, the central bank shared with Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger and Senegal; Lomé is home to big regional banks too. There is no special CFA franc symbol in Unicode and none on the banknotes: prices are written with F CFA or FCFA after the number, French style, with a space between thousands, as in 2 500 F CFA, or just 2 500 F on a market sign. The franc sign ₣ belonged to the old French franc and is not used for the CFA.

The CFA franc is pegged to the euro at 655.957 francs to €1, which is why prices look large to visitors. 💰 and 🪙 are the money emoji people send.

Ewe, Kabiyè and French letters to copy and paste

French is Togo's official language, spoken by about 3.7 million people by CLDR estimates in a country of about 9 million, but most people grow up with a Togolese language first, and two are national languages: Ewe in the south, spoken by about 1.5 million in Togo by the same estimates and more than 5 million counting Ghana, and Kabiyè in the north. Lomé's everyday market language, Mina or Gen, is close to Ewe. Ewe's Latin alphabet, 35 letters counting the digraphs dz, gb, kp, ny and ts, includes seven distinctive letters: Ɖ ɖ, a d made with the tongue curled back; Ƒ ƒ, an f blown through both lips; Ʋ ʋ, a v made the same way, as in the language's own name, Eʋegbe; Ɣ ɣ, a soft throaty g; Ŋ ŋ, the ng of "sing", which can start a word, as in ŋdi, morning; and Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ, the open vowels of "bet" and "law". Plain x writes the sound of ch in Scottish "loch", as in xɔ, house.

Ewe is tonal: an acute marks a high tone (á é í ó ú) and a grave a low one (à è ì ò ù), though everyday writing often leaves them out. A tilde marks a nasal vowel: ã ẽ ĩ õ ũ. For ɛ or ɔ with a tone or a tilde, type the letter and then the combining mark from the grid: ɔ followed by ̃ gives ɔ̃, ɛ followed by ́ gives ɛ́. Kabiyè, written Kabɩyɛ by its speakers, uses ɛ, ɔ and ŋ as well and adds Ɩ ɩ and Ʊ ʊ, two looser vowels next to i and u.

On a computer, Microsoft Word types any of them if you enter the code and press Alt+X: 0256 for ɖ, 0192 for ƒ, 028B for ʋ, 0263 for ɣ, 014B for ŋ, 025B for ɛ, 0254 for ɔ, 0269 for ɩ and 028A for ʊ (0189, 0191, 01B2, 0194, 014A, 0190, 0186, 0196 and 01B1 for the capitals); on a Mac add the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and hold Option while typing the same codes. On a phone, add an Ewe keyboard or copy them from this page. Watch the look-alikes: Ɖ looks exactly like the Croatian and Vietnamese Đ but its small letter is ɖ, ƒ is the same character as the florin sign, ɣ is not the Greek γ, ɩ is not the Greek ι, and Ʋ (V with hook) and Ʊ (upsilon) look almost alike. Keyboards in Togo are usually French AZERTY, with é è à ç ù on their own keys and ê â î ô û from the ^ dead key; French quotes are « » with a space inside, « comme ça ». See the Ewe and French collections for the full alphabets, and the Ghana and Benin pages for the neighbours.

Lomé, Kpalimé and Koutammakou: everyday Togo emoji

🏙️ is Lomé, the capital, which sits right on the Ghana border at one end of a coast only about 56 km long. 🏍️ is its zémidjan or zem, the motorbike taxis that carry most of the city, 🧺 the Grand Marché, and 👗🧵🚗 the Nana Benz, the women cloth traders of the market who grew rich enough on wax-print fabric in the 1960s and 70s to be driven in Mercedes-Benz cars. 🚢 is the deep-water port that serves Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali as well. 🏖️🌊🌴🥥 is the beach along the city, and 🛶🐟 the painted fishing pirogues whose crews haul their long nets onto the sand by hand.

Inland, ⛰️☕🍫 is Kpalimé, a town of green hills, waterfalls and coffee and cocoa farms near Mont Agou, Togo's highest point, and 🦋 the butterfly walks in the Kloto forest above it. 🛖 is Koutammakou, the land of the Batammariba in the far north, whose two-storey earth tower houses, the takienta, made it a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004. ⛏️ is phosphate, mined near the coast and long one of the country's main exports, with cotton, coffee and cocoa.

Food: 🍠 is fufu, pounded yam eaten with a sauce, 🍲🥘 the sauce pots, among them peanut sauce 🥜 and palm-nut sauce, 🌽 akoumé, the maize paste often served with gboma dessi, a sauce of greens 🥬 with tomato 🍅 and smoked fish, and 🍗🌶️ koklo meme, grilled chicken with hot pepper. 🍚🫘 is ayimolou, rice and beans, 🍌 fried plantain, 🥣 a bowl of porridge or gari. To drink there is tchoukoutou, sorghum beer of the north 🍺, and sodabi, the strong palm spirit 🥃.

Music: 🎤🎶 for Bella Bellow, the singer who carried Togolese song abroad in the 1960s and 70s, for King Mensah, and for Toofan's dance hits, with 💃🕺 for the dancing. Football: ⚽🦅🇹🇬 cheers Les Éperviers, the Sparrowhawks (🦅 is the nearest bird), who played at the 2006 World Cup in Germany 🏆, led by Emmanuel Adebayor, African Footballer of the Year in 2008. 🛶🥉 is Benjamin Boukpeti's canoe slalom bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Togo's first Olympic medal.