Tokelau Emoji & Symbols

The Tokelau flag emoji 🇹🇰 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, T and K (Tokelau's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Like most country and territory flags it became usable as an emoji in 2015. Where a system has no flag images, as with Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters TK instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

Until 2009 Tokelau flew the New Zealand flag 🇳🇿. Its own flag, chosen by Tokelau's parliament, the General Fono, and flown since 2009, is dark blue with a stylised yellow Tokelauan canoe sailing toward the Southern Cross, four white stars. The canoe 🛶 stands for Tokelau's journey toward its own future and the stars ⭐ for the old navigators' guide across the Pacific, so the flag colours are pasted as 💙💛 and the flag itself as 🛶⭐ or 🇹🇰🛶.

Tokelau symbols: three atolls, the lagoon and the sun

Tokelau is three coral atolls north of Samoa: Atafu, Nukunonu, the largest, and Fakaofo. Each is a ring of narrow islets, called motu, around a lagoon, with about 10 square kilometres of land between all three and nowhere more than about 5 metres above the sea. 🏝️🌴🥥 is the whole landscape, 🌊 is everywhere, and 🌀 is a real worry, since cyclones and rising seas threaten land this low. CLDR estimates about 1,650 people live there, while several times as many people of Tokelauan descent live in New Zealand, most of them around Wellington and Auckland.

In 2012 Tokelau installed thousands of solar panels and banks of batteries across its three atolls, with generators kept as backup, becoming one of the first places in the world to meet almost all its electricity needs with solar power: ☀️⚡🔋 is a fair Tokelau emoji. Since the last days of 2011, when Tokelau and Samoa 🇼🇸 together jumped across the International Date Line, it keeps time at UTC+13, so it is among the first places on Earth to see each new day 🌅 and each New Year 🎆, while American Samoa 🇦🇸, not far to the south, is still a day behind.

Reef, fishing and food: Tokelau emoji from the sea

Life in Tokelau is lived on the lagoon and the reef. People fish from small boats and outrigger canoes 🛶🎣 for tuna and reef fish 🐟🐠, gather octopus 🐙 and shellfish 🐚 on the reef flats, and hunt the coconut crab 🦀 on the motu. Turtles 🐢 and sharks 🦈 share the water; in 2011 Tokelau declared its whole ocean area a shark sanctuary, closed to shark fishing.

The coconut 🥥 is everything: food, drink, oil, rope and thatch. Atoll soil is thin, so swamp taro (pulaka) and breadfruit are grown with care, and Unicode has none of them, so 🍠 has to stand in. Pigs 🐖 are raised for feasts, and big meals are cooked in the umu, the earth oven of hot stones 🔥. Under the inati system each village shares out a communal catch or harvest among all its families 🤝, a custom that is still alive.

Village life, faith and the fatele

Each atoll is one village governed by its council of elders, the taupulega, and families 👪 are at the centre of everything. Most Tokelauans are Christian ✝️🙏: Atafu is mainly Congregational, Nukunonu mainly Catholic and Fakaofo has both, so ⛪📖 are everyday emoji and Sunday is kept for church and rest. Women weave pandanus into mats, fans and baskets 🧺, and flower garlands 🌺 are worn for dancing and celebrations.

The great performance of Tokelau is the fatele, a group dance-song 💃🕺🎶: the singers sit and stand together, the dancers move in front, and each verse is repeated faster and louder until it ends in a rush. The beat comes from the pokihi, a wooden box drum, and the pate, a slit drum 🥁🪘. That sound reached the whole world through Te Vaka, the band of Opetaia Foaʻi, a musician of Tokelauan and Tuvaluan heritage, who co-wrote the songs of Disney's Moana; the Tokelauan lines of We Know the Way ⛵🌊 are sung in his voice. Kilikiti 🏏 (Pacific cricket), volleyball 🏐 and rugby 🏉 are popular sports, and Christmas and New Year 🎉🎆 are big celebrations, with fatele, sport and feasting.

A New Zealand territory: referendums, the boat from Apia and .tk

Tokelau is a territory of New Zealand 🇳🇿, and Tokelauans are New Zealand citizens. In referendums in 2006 and 2007 a majority voted for self-government in free association with New Zealand 🗳️, but both times the vote fell just short of the two-thirds that was needed, so Tokelau remains a territory. Leadership rotates: each year one of the three atoll leaders, the faipule, serves as Ulu-o-Tokelau, the head of Tokelau. Tokelauans also regard Olohega (Swains Island), now part of American Samoa 🇦🇸, as part of their homeland.

Tokelau has no airport. The way in is by ship 🛳️ from Apia in Samoa, a voyage of more than a day, which is why 🇹🇰🇼🇸 travel together in so many posts. Online 🌐📡 Tokelau is famous for .tk, its country domain: for years it was given away free through the company Freenom, became the country domain with more registered names than any other, and once brought Tokelau licensing income, though no funds reached Teletok after mid-2013; Freenom stopped new registrations in 2023.

Tokelau currency symbol $ and Tokelauan letters ā ē ī ō ū

Tokelau's currency is the New Zealand dollar, written with the ordinary dollar sign $ (or NZ$ when it needs telling apart) and cents ¢; 💵 and 🪙 are its emoji. There is no separate Tokelau currency symbol.

Tokelauan (gagana Tokelau) is a Polynesian language closest to Tuvaluan and Samoan, official alongside English; CLDR counts about 600 English speakers and about 300 Samoan speakers on the atolls, and most residents speak Tokelauan. Its alphabet uses plain Latin letters, and g is said like the ng in sing. Long vowels are marked with a macron: ā ē ī ō ū, as in the greeting Mālō ni! (hello). Samoan was long the language of the church and of schoolbooks. To type the macrons, long-press the vowel on a phone; on a Mac use the ABC Extended input and press Option+A then the vowel; on Windows add the Māori keyboard and press the tilde/backtick key before the vowel, or in Word type the code (0101 for ā) and press Alt+X. In HTML they are ā ē ī ō ū. Neighbouring pages: Samoa 🇼🇸, Tuvalu 🇹🇻, American Samoa 🇦🇸, New Zealand 🇳🇿 and the Samoan and English language collections.