Western Sahara Emoji

Yes, there is a Western Sahara emoji: 🇪🇭. Like every country flag emoji it is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator symbols, 🇪 and 🇭, for the territory's ISO code EH, which phones and Macs join into a flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters EH, while the person you send them to still sees the flag on their phone.

Most emoji sets draw 🇪🇭 as the flag of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the state the Polisario Front proclaimed in 1976: three horizontal stripes of black, white and green, a red triangle at the hoist, and a red crescent and star ☪️ in the white stripe. Its colours are the Pan-Arab colours that go back to the flag of the 1916 Arab Revolt. Where flags don't show, people write it in hearts or squares, 🖤🤍💚❤️ or ⬛⬜🟩🔺.

Western Sahara is a disputed territory, and the flag says so. It was a Spanish colony until 1975 and is on the United Nations' list of non-self-governing territories. Morocco administers most of it, including the coast and the cities, and calls it its Southern Provinces; people there who see it that way use 🇲🇦. The Polisario Front holds the thinly populated east and speaks for the Sahrawi refugees in camps near Tindouf in Algeria 🇩🇿, and a UN mission has been there since 1991. This page doesn't take a side: it collects the characters people use for the land, its people and its culture.

Western Sahara flag vs Palestine flag: 🇪🇭 or 🇵🇸?

The most common mix-up: 🇪🇭 and 🇵🇸 both have black, white and green stripes and a red triangle at the hoist. The difference is the red crescent and star in the middle of Western Sahara's flag; Palestine's white stripe is empty. Jordan's flag 🇯🇴 is close too, but it has a white seven-pointed star inside the red triangle. If your screen shows letters instead of flags, EH is Western Sahara, PS is Palestine and JO is Jordan.

The neighbours have their own collections: Morocco 🇲🇦 to the north, Mauritania 🇲🇷 to the south and east, Algeria 🇩🇿 at the short north-eastern border, and Spain 🇪🇸, the former colonial power, whose Canary Islands lie just off the coast.

Western Sahara currency symbol: dirham د.م.

The Sahrawi Republic's symbolic currency is the Sahrawi peseta, not used in current transactions. In the Moroccan-administered part, which is where almost everyone lives, people pay in the Moroccan dirham: written MAD in banking, DH on price tags, and د.م. in Arabic, dal and mim, short for درهم مغربي (Moroccan dirham). A dirham is divided into 100 centimes. In the refugee camps around Tindouf the Algerian dinar is used, written DZD or د.ج. Copy the letters from the grid and add the full stops; because Arabic runs right to left, د ends up on the right.

💰, 🪙 and 💵 are the money emoji people put next to a price. Unicode has no dirham sign, so ignore the decorative "dirham symbols" offered elsewhere.

Arabic letters for Western Sahara

Arabic is the language of Western Sahara; CLDR's estimate counts the whole population, roughly 650,000 people, as Arabic speakers. What Sahrawis speak at home is Hassaniya, the Arabic of the western Sahara that is also the main language of Mauritania, with a rich tradition of oral poetry; it is written, when it is written, in the ordinary Arabic alphabet, and formal writing is in Modern Standard Arabic. The grid has its 28 letters grouped 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. Hamza ء is the catch in the throat, ة ends most feminine words, and ى ends words like على.

Paste the letters together and they join: صحراء is "desert", the word English borrowed as Sahara, and الصحراء الغربية (as-Sahra al-Gharbiyya) is Western Sahara. A Sahrawi is صحراوي, the city of Laayoune is العيون, "the springs", and Dakhla is الداخلة. Numbers are usually written with the digits 0–9 here, as everywhere in the Maghreb; the comma ، , question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛ are turned to suit the script.

To type Arabic, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language › Language & region on Windows and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add it under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on iPhone and Android add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. Spanish is still widely known among Sahrawis, many of whom studied in Spain or Cuba, and French is used in the Moroccan administration: for their letters see the Spanish and French collections, and for the whole alphabet with vowel marks the Arabic and Hassaniyya collections.

Desert, tea and camel emoji: Sahrawi life

🏜️ Most of Western Sahara is flat stony desert and dunes, hot ☀️ by day, windy 🌬️, and with a night sky 🌌 that people photograph for its stars. Sahrawis were nomads who moved their camels 🐪 and goats 🐐 with the rain, which earned them the nickname "sons of the clouds", and the big woven tent ⛺, the khaima, is still where guests are received and families gather, even in town. Camel milk 🥛 and camel meat 🍖 are the food of the desert, eaten with bread 🫓 and from one shared dish 🥘; dates 🌴 come from the oases. Fennec foxes 🦊, lizards 🦎 and scorpions 🦂 live in the sand, and today the desert is crossed in pickups 🛻 rather than by caravan.

Tea 🫖🍵 is the centre of every visit. Strong green tea, often with mint 🌿 and plenty of sugar 🍬, is brewed over embers 🔥 and poured from high up to raise a foam, and it comes in three rounds; a well-known saying has it that the first glass is bitter like life, the second sweet like love, the third gentle like death. Women wear the melhfa, a long, colourful wrapped cloth 🧕, and men the wide blue or white daraa robe with a turban 👳 against the sand. Sahrawi music is the tbal drum 🥁 and hand-clapping under women's voices, and in modern bands the electric guitar 🎸; the singer Mariem Hassan carried this music to audiences around the world.

Atlantic coast, faith and holidays

🌊 Western Sahara has around 1,100 km of Atlantic coast and some of the richest fishing waters off Africa. Laayoune's port and Dakhla land sardines 🐟, octopus 🐙 and squid 🦑, and Dakhla also farms oysters 🦪 in its bay. Dakhla's long, flat lagoon, with steady trade winds, has made it a well-known spot for kitesurfing 🪁 and surfing 🏄, so 🏖️🌅🪁 is a typical Dakhla post.

Almost everyone is Sunni Muslim 🕌, so the shared holidays are religious: Ramadan 🌙, with رمضان كريم and evening tea after breaking the fast, Eid al-Fitr at its end, and Eid al-Adha, when families slaughter a sheep 🐑. Political anniversaries depend on who is celebrating: Morocco marks the Green March on 6 November, and the Polisario Front the proclamation of the Sahrawi Republic on 27 February.