Yemen Emoji

🇾🇪 the Yemen flag emoji is a plain horizontal tricolour, red on top, white in the middle and black at the bottom, with no emblem on it. Its Unicode flag sequence is two regional indicator symbols, 🇾 and 🇪, for the country code YE; platforms that support that sequence display the pair as a flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters YE, while the person you send them to still sees the flag.

The flag was raised on 22 May 1990, the day North Yemen and South Yemen united as the Republic of Yemen, and its three colours were the ones both flags already shared. They are usually explained as red for the blood of the martyrs and for unity, white for a bright future, and black for the dark days of the past. Red goes on top: a flag shown black side up is upside down. Egypt, Iraq and Sudan fly the same pan-Arab red, white and black, but each adds an emblem, writing or a triangle; Yemen's alone is three bare stripes. Where flag emoji don't show, people write it in its colours, ❤️🤍🖤, 🟥⬜⬛ or 🔴⚪⚫.

There is no South Yemen flag emoji in Unicode's emoji flag list: it lists a flag for current Yemen 🇾🇪, but none for the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (1967–1990). Its flag, the red, white and black stripes with a light blue triangle and a red star at the hoist, can only be shared as a picture or a sticker. The national emblem is a golden eagle 🦅 holding a scroll that reads الجمهورية اليمنية (the Republic of Yemen), with a shield 🛡️ on its breast showing a coffee plant above the ancient dam of Marib. 🗡️ stands for the jambiya, the curved dagger many Yemeni men wear at the front of the belt.

Yemeni rial symbol ﷼: YER and ر.ي.

The Yemeni rial is written ﷼, the Unicode RIAL SIGN (U+FDFC), a single character that draws the Arabic word ريال as one ligature; the same sign also serves the Iranian rial, so in practice Yemeni prices usually say YER in banking and English, or ر.ي. in Arabic, short for ريال يمني (Yemeni rial). Copy ﷼ from the grid; on an Arabic keyboard you type ريال as four letters. A rial is divided into 100 fils, though fils no longer turn up in daily life.

Since the central bank split in 2016 between Sana'a and Aden, Yemen has had two kinds of banknotes in circulation: the older notes in the north and newer notes printed for the government in the south, and they trade at very different rates against the dollar. 💰, 🪙 and 💵 are the money emoji that go with ﷼.

Arabic letters and numbers for Yemen

Arabic is Yemen's official language; CLDR estimates that about 24 million people in Yemen are functional in it. Yemenis speak their own San'ani, Ta'izzi, Adeni and Hadrami Arabic at home and write Modern Standard Arabic in the Arabic script: 28 letters, written right to left and joined to one another, so a letter changes shape at the start, middle and end of a word. The grid groups them 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, sitting alone or on alif أ إ, waw ؤ and ya ئ; ة (ta marbuta) ends most feminine words and ى (alif maqsura) ends words like على. Yemen in Arabic is اليمن (al-Yaman), a Yemeni is يمني, and Sana'a is صنعاء, ending in hamza.

To type Arabic on Windows, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language › Language & region and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add Arabic under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on iPhone and Android add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. Arabic punctuation is turned to suit the script: the comma ، is upside down, the question mark ؟ is mirrored, and the semicolon is ؛. Eastern Arabic digits ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ are standard in Yemeni newspapers and on banknotes, and a number is still written largest place first, left to right: ٢٢ is 22.

For the full alphabet with its vowel marks see the Arabic collection; CLDR estimates that close to 3 million people in Yemen are functional in English; English has its own. In the far east and on Socotra people also speak Mehri and Soqotri, Modern South Arabian languages that are seldom written.

Yemeni coffee, mandi, saltah and honey emoji

☕ belongs to Yemen more than to almost anywhere: Sufis in Yemen were drinking coffee by the 15th century, and the beans 🫘 grown on the terraced highlands left the world through the Red Sea port of al-Mukha, which is why chocolatey coffee is still called mocha. At home many Yemenis drink qishr, a light brew of the dried coffee husks with ginger 🫚, or shai haleeb, sweet milk tea 🫖🍵🥛.

🍖🍚 is mandi, the Hadrami dish of lamb or chicken 🍗 slow-cooked over rice in a pit oven 🔥, now eaten across Arabia. 🍲 is saltah, the national dish, a meat broth stew topped with whipped fenugreek and brought to the table still bubbling in a stone pot, and its cousin fahsa with shredded lamb; both are scooped up with flatbread 🫓 like flaky malawah or spongy lahoh. Aden and the Hadramawt coast bake fish 🐟 in clay ovens. 🍯🐝 stands for Sidr honey from Wadi Do'an in the Hadramawt, one of the most prized honeys in the world, poured over bint al-sahn, a layered honey bread. 🍇 are the grapes and raisins of the Sana'a basin and 🥭 the mangoes of the lowlands. 🌿 is how people refer to qat, the leaves many Yemenis chew at long afternoon gatherings.

Old Sana'a, Shibam, Socotra and the sea

🏘️ is Old Sana'a, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of brown tower houses trimmed in white gypsum, their arched qamariya windows glowing with coloured glass at night, around the Great Mosque 🕌. 🧱🏙️ is Shibam in the Hadramawt, a walled town of mud-brick tower houses five to eleven storeys tall, mostly from the 16th century, often called the Manhattan of the desert. 🏰 is Dar al-Hajar, the Rock Palace built on top of a stone pinnacle in Wadi Dhahr near Sana'a. 🏛️👑 is Marib, capital of the ancient kingdom of Saba, the biblical Sheba, where pillars of its temples still stand near the remains of the great dam.

⛰️🌄 are the western highlands, where Jabal an-Nabi Shu'ayb rises to about 3,670 metres, the highest point of the Arabian Peninsula, above villages and terraced fields. 🌴🏜️ are the palm-filled wadis and the sands toward the Empty Quarter. 🏝️🌳 is Socotra, the island in the Arabian Sea famous for its umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees; about a third of its plants grow nowhere else. 🌊⚓🚢 is Aden, whose harbour lies beside the crater of an extinct volcano at the entrance to the Red Sea, ⛵ the wooden dhows still built on the coast, 🪸🐠 the reefs, and 🐢 the green turtles that nest on the beaches. The rare Arabian leopard 🐆 still survives in a few remote mountains, and camels 🐪 and goats 🐐 are everywhere.

Yemen emoji combos for Unity Day, Eid and football

Yemenis post 🇾🇪🎆 on 22 May, Unity Day, and again on 26 September, 14 October and 30 November, the anniversaries of the revolutions of 1962 and 1963 and of independence from Britain in 1967. During Ramadan it is 🌙📿 with رمضان كريم (Ramadan Kareem), at Eid عيد مبارك (Eid Mubarak) with 🎉, and at Eid al-Adha 🐑. Weddings and holidays bring out the bara', the men's dance in rows with jambiyas raised, to drums 🥁🪘🕺, and 🎶 the song of Sana'a, recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage. 🇾🇪🤲🕊️ is what people abroad send with their prayers for peace in Yemen.

⚽🇾🇪 is for the national team, which played its first Asian Cup as a unified country in 2019 and hosted the Gulf Cup in Aden in 2010. Copy any combo below, or tap single emoji in the grid.