Vietnam Emoji & Symbols

The Vietnam flag emoji 🇻🇳 shows a red field with a large yellow five-pointed star. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇻 and 🇳, for the country code VN; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the two letters side by side. If you need the star on its own, ⭐ is the emoji and ★ the plain text star that works in names and bios.

🪷 the lotus is widely treated as Vietnam's national flower: it grows in ponds all over the country, rises out of mud unstained, which made it a symbol of purity in Buddhist and folk tradition, and appears everywhere from pagoda carvings to the Vietnam Airlines logo. 🐲 the dragon runs through Vietnamese identity: people call themselves con Rồng cháu Tiên, "children of the dragon, grandchildren of the fairy", after the legend of the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the fairy Âu Cơ, and Hạ Long Bay takes its name from a descending dragon.

🥁 stands for the bronze drums of the Đông Sơn culture, cast more than two thousand years ago in the Red River valley and decorated with suns, birds and boats. Their star-shaped centre pattern is one of the best-known images of ancient Vietnam.

Vietnamese food emoji: phở 🍜, bánh mì 🥖 and cà phê ☕

🍜 is the emoji for phở, the beef or chicken noodle soup eaten for breakfast across the country, and it serves just as well for bún chả, bún bò Huế or any noodle bowl. Add 🌿 🌶️ 🍋‍🟩 for the plate of herbs, chilli and lime that comes with it. 🥖 is bánh mì, the crisp baguette sandwich that grew out of French bread and became thoroughly Vietnamese. 🍚 covers cơm, rice with everything, including Saigon's cơm tấm (broken rice); 🍲 is lẩu, the hot pot shared around a table; 🥟 is bánh bao, the steamed bun; 🍮 is bánh flan, the caramel custard sold in every market; 🥢 are the chopsticks for all of it.

The sea and the rivers feed the kitchen: 🐟 for fish and the fish sauce (nước mắm) that seasons almost everything, 🦐 🦀 🦑 for seafood, and 🐌 for ốc, the shellfish and snail dishes that fill Saigon's evening street stalls. For fruit, 🥭 🥥 🍌 🍍 are the ones with emoji; durian, rambutan, dragon fruit and jackfruit have none yet.

☕ is cà phê: Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer after Brazil, mostly robusta, and the classic order is cà phê sữa đá, strong drip coffee with condensed milk over ice (☕🧊). 🍵 is tea, including the free iced tea (trà đá) poured at street stalls, 🧋 is the hugely popular trà sữa (milk tea), and 🍺🍻 are bia hơi, fresh draught beer, raised with "Một, hai, ba, dô!".

Tết emoji and Mid-Autumn: 🧧 🌸 🌼 🏮 🥮

Tết Nguyên Đán, the Lunar New Year, is the biggest holiday of the year. 🧧 is lì xì, lucky money given in red envelopes to children and younger relatives. 🌸 stands in for hoa đào, the pink peach blossom of the North, and 🌼 for hoa mai, the yellow apricot blossom of the South; 🍊 is the kumquat tree set by the door, and 🍉 the watermelon whose red flesh promises a lucky year. 🎆 is the midnight fireworks display; 🧨 is still the emoji people send, though household firecrackers have been banned in Vietnam since 1995. The greeting is Chúc mừng năm mới! (Happy New Year).

The year's animal comes from the 12 con giáp, which include 🐃 the water buffalo and 🐈 the cat; the Chinese zodiac has the ox and the rabbit in those places. So a cat year in Vietnam is a rabbit year in China.

Tết Trung Thu, the Mid-Autumn Festival, belongs to children. They parade at night with 🏮 lanterns, above all the five-pointed star lantern (đèn ông sao, ⭐), eat 🥮 bánh trung thu (mooncakes) under the 🌕 full moon and follow the drums of the 🦁 lion dance, múa lân.

Vietnam emoji for travel, places and everyday life

🛵 and 🏍️ are the emoji of Vietnamese streets: motorbikes are how most families get around, and a wave of them at a green light is the first thing visitors film in Hà Nội or Hồ Chí Minh City 🏙️. 🏝️⛵ is Hạ Long Bay with its limestone islands and junk boats; 🏮 alone says Hội An, the old trading town lit by silk lanterns; ⛰️🌾 is Sa Pa and its terraced rice fields; 🛶🥥 is the Mekong Delta and its floating markets; 🏞️ is Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng, home of Sơn Đoòng, often called the largest cave in the world; 🏖️🌴 covers the long coast from Đà Nẵng to Phú Quốc, and 🌉 Đà Nẵng's Dragon Bridge, which breathes fire on weekend nights.

🐢 points to Hoàn Kiếm Lake in Hà Nội, the Lake of the Returned Sword, where legend says a golden turtle took back the magic sword of King Lê Lợi. 🐘 is the elephant of the Central Highlands around Buôn Ma Thuột.

For faith, ☸️ stands for Buddhism, the largest organised religion, practised in pagodas that have no emoji of their own; 🛕 fits the brick towers of the Cham people, such as Mỹ Sơn and Po Nagar, built for Hindu gods; ⛪ is the Catholic church, from Saigon's red-brick Notre-Dame Cathedral to village churches in the North. 🎭 stands for múa rối nước, water puppetry, performed in a pool with the puppeteers hidden behind a screen; 🎤 is karaoke, a favourite night out; 👒 is the nearest emoji to the nón lá, the palm-leaf conical hat. In sport, ⚽ is the national passion, 🏸 is played in every park, and 🥋 stands for Vovinam, the Vietnamese martial art.

Vietnamese letters and the dong sign ₫: how to type them

Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, called chữ Quốc ngữ, which replaced Chinese characters and the native chữ Nôm script for everyday use in the early 20th century. The Vietnamese alphabet has 29 letters: it excludes F, J, W and Z from the basic Latin set and adds seven letters: Ă ă, Â â, Đ đ, Ê ê, Ô ô, Ơ ơ and Ư ư. Đ writes the sound of an English d, while plain d sounds like z in the North and like y in the South. Five tone marks apply to the vowels: grave à (huyền), hook above ả (hỏi), tilde ã (ngã), acute á (sắc) and dot below ạ (nặng); no mark is the level tone. They change the word completely: ma ghost, mà but, mả tomb, mã horse, má mother or cheek, mạ rice seedling. The Vietnamese Letters collection includes A/a with all five tone marks.

To type them, Vietnamese people use an input method rather than a separate keyboard. With Telex, you type aa for â, aw for ă, dd for đ, ee for ê, oo for ô, ow for ơ, uw for ư, then a tone key after the syllable: s for sắc, f for huyền, r for hỏi, x for ngã, j for nặng, so Vieetj Nam becomes Việt Nam. VNI does the same with digits. Both are built into macOS, recent Windows versions and the Vietnamese keyboards of Android and iPhone, and many Windows users install UniKey.

The currency is the Vietnamese đồng, symbol ₫ (U+20AB), code VND. It goes after the amount, and Vietnamese uses dots to group thousands: 50.000 ₫. In everyday writing people often just put a small đ (50.000đ) or a k for thousands (50k). In HTML ₫ is ₫; in Word you can type 20AB and press Alt + X.

Vietnam has about 106 million people by CLDR's estimate, and CLDR's roughly 91 million estimate for Vietnamese counts literate, functional users and can include additional-language speakers. Other languages of the country include Hmong Daw and Hmong Njua in the northern mountains, Tai Dam in the Northwest and Chinese, each with its own collection.