Vanuatu Emoji & Symbols

The Vanuatu flag emoji 🇻🇺 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, V and U (Vanuatu's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; most country flags became emoji in 2015. Where flags are not supported, as in Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters VU, but the text is the same and still shows as the flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was adopted in 1980, the year of independence. Red stands for the blood of boars and of people, green for the richness of the islands, black for the ni-Vanuatu, the people of Vanuatu, and the yellow Y, edged in black, for the light of the Gospel and for the shape of the island chain itself. In the black triangle sits a curled boar's tusk, the sign of wealth and rank, because a pig whose tusk has grown into a full circle is one of the most valuable things a man can give, around two crossed fronds of the namele fern, a sign of peace whose 39 leaflets stood for the 39 members of the legislature at the time. That is why people write the flag as hearts, ❤️💚🖤💛, and pair 🇻🇺 with 🐗 and 🌿. The national motto, Long God yumi stanap, Bislama for "In God we stand", explains the 🙏 that often follows.

Vanuatu symbols and meanings: volcanoes, land diving and sand drawing

Vanuatu is a Y-shaped chain of some 80 islands, and several of them are live volcanoes, so 🌋🔥 is a Vanuatu emoji in its own right. Mount Yasur on Tanna has been erupting almost without pause for centuries; visitors walk up to the crater rim at dusk to watch it throw lava into the air, and its glow drew Captain Cook ashore in 1774. Ambrym, further north, is known for its lava lakes. The other side of island life is 🏝️🏖️🌴: the white sand of Champagne Beach on Espiritu Santo and the blue holes of Santo, freshwater pools of startling colour that people mark with 💙.

On Pentecost Island, men dive head first from wooden towers with liana vines tied to their ankles, a rite called the nagol or land dive, held in the yam season to bless the harvest; it is widely seen as the forerunner of bungee jumping. Unicode has no land-diving emoji, so people use 🪢 for the vines, 🪵 for the tower and 🙌 for the crowd. Sand drawing (sandroing) is drawn in sand or volcanic ash with one finger ☝️ in a single unbroken line, recording stories, rules and messages; UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage, and animals such as the turtle 🐢 are among the designs drawn. On Ambrym, carved upright slit-gong drums 🪘🥁 stand in the dancing grounds, and on Gaua women perform water music, slapping and scooping the sea 🌊 into rhythms.

Kava, lap lap and Vanuatu food emoji

Vanuatu is proud of its kava, the drink made from the root of a pepper plant 🌿 and famously strong here. In the evening, as the light goes 🌆, people gather in a nakamal, the kava house or bar, and drink it from a half coconut shell 🥥, usually in one go. 🛖 is the thatched house and 🧺 the baskets and mats women weave from pandanus.

The national dish is lap lap: grated yam, taro, manioc or banana mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in leaves and baked on hot stones in an earth oven, often with pork or chicken. 🫜 and 🍠 stand in for the root crops, 🍌🍃🪨 for the rest. Simboro is grated root rolled in leaves and boiled in coconut milk. Pigs 🐖 matter for feasts and for status, Santo's grass-fed beef 🐄🥩 is a point of pride, and the coconut crab 🦀 is the island delicacy. 🥭🍍 come from every garden, ☕ is Tanna coffee, 🍫 the island-grown cocoa, 🍺 a cold Tusker, the local beer, and 🥖 the baguette, still baked in Port Vila from the French years.

Vanuatu Independence Day, church and sport emoji

Independence Day, 30 July, marks the end in 1980 of the New Hebrides, a colony that Britain 🇬🇧 and France 🇫🇷 ruled together as a "condominium", with two police forces, two school systems and two currencies. Parades, string-band music 🎸🎶, sport and fireworks fill the week, and feeds fill with Happy Independence Day Vanuatu! 🇻🇺🎉 and the flag hearts. Most ni-Vanuatu are Christian, the Presbyterian church being the largest, so ✝️⛪🙏 and Christmas 🎄 are everyday emoji; the Bible 📖 has been translated into Bislama.

Football ⚽ is the most popular sport, and the national team plays in Oceania competitions. Beach volleyball 🏐 is where Vanuatu punches above its weight, with women's pairs that are among the strongest in the Pacific, and cricket 🏏 is played too. Around the islands people travel by plane ✈️ and boat; cruise ships 🛳️ call at Port Vila, where the minibuses 🚐 that serve as taxis carry a B on their number plates.

Reef and wreck diving emoji: 🪸🐠🤿🚢

Vanuatu's reefs 🪸🐠🐢 and warm water make it a diving destination, and two dives are famous. Off Espiritu Santo lies the SS President Coolidge 🚢, a liner turned troopship that hit mines in 1942 and is now one of the best-known wreck dives in the world. Nearby, Million Dollar Point is where American forces pushed their equipment into the sea at the end of the Second World War rather than leave it behind. Near Port Vila, Hideaway Island has an underwater post office 📮 where snorkellers 🤿 post waterproof postcards a few metres down.

Dolphins 🐬 play in the bays, humpback whales 🐋 pass through in the southern winter, and on land 🦇 are the flying foxes and 🦜 the bright lorikeets. 🌀 is a serious emoji here too: the cyclone season runs through the southern summer, and Cyclone Pam, a Category 5 storm, hit in March 2015.

Bislama, French letters and the vatu (VT)

Vanuatu has three official languages. Bislama, the national language and an English-based creole, is the one everyone shares: CLDR estimates about 290,000 speakers. English (about 260,000) and French (about 100,000) are the languages of schooling, and alongside them islanders speak more than a hundred local languages, one of the highest numbers per person anywhere. Common written Bislama uses an unaccented Latin alphabet but omits C, Q, X and Z; its spelling is roughly phonemic: Halo, Tangkyu tumas (thank you very much), Lukim yu (see you), yumi (we, you and I). Its name comes from bêche-de-mer, the sea cucumber traded in the 19th century. See our Bislama, English and French collections for each language.

French needs the accented letters in the grid: é è ê ë à â ç î ï ô ù û ü ÿ and the ligatures œ and æ, as in École or Fête de l'Indépendance. On Windows, the US-International keyboard gives é with ' + e and ç with ' + c; on a Mac, hold the letter key and pick the accent; on a phone, long-press the letter. The money is the vatu (VUV), which has no Unicode sign and no cents and is written VT, as in VT 1,000 or 1000 VT; 🪙 and 💰 are the emoji people use for it.