Romanian flag

Romania's tricolour: blue by the pole, yellow in the middle, red outside.

Romania is a country of about nineteen million people in southeastern Europe, bordered by the Black Sea and the Carpathian mountains, with Bucharest as its capital. Romanians speak a Romance language, a cousin of Italian and Spanish surrounded by Slavic and Hungarian neighbours, which is one reason the flag is often used as shorthand for the language itself. The country joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007, and millions of Romanians now live and work in Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom, so the flag turns up far beyond Romania's borders.

The blue-yellow-red tricolour dates from the revolutionary year 1848, when Romanians in Wallachia and Moldavia rallied under it, and vertical stripes have been the standard since the 1860s. The three colours were originally read as the colours of the old principalities, and Romanian law names the shades as cobalt blue, chrome yellow and vermilion red. Unlike many European flags, it carries nothing in the middle: no coat of arms, no star, just three plain bands. Romanians call it simply tricolorul, "the tricolour", and celebrate it on 26 June, National Flag Day.

The flag's modern form carries a famous story. Under communism the yellow stripe bore the state emblem. During the revolution of December 1989, protesters cut the emblem out, and the flag with a hole in the middle became the image of the uprising. The plain tricolour was made official again straight afterwards, so the emoji you see today is also the flag of that revolution.

What does it mean when someone sends 🇷🇴?

Usually "this is Romanian" or "I'm Romanian", said with warmth.

In a profile bio it marks nationality or family roots, often from someone living abroad who wants it known where they come from; it does not say where they live now. Around a football, tennis or handball match it is a cheer for the national team, often with the chant "Hai România!" ("Come on, Romania!"). On 1 December, Romania's National Day, it floods feeds with birthday-style greetings, and it appears beside Romanian-language versions of posts, menus and announcements as a language label.

The emoji is friendly and neutral in almost every setting. The one place it carries extra weight is in conversations about Moldova, Romania's neighbour, where most people also speak Romanian: posting 🇷🇴 beside 🇲🇩 often expresses a sense of shared identity, which some Moldovans embrace and others read as a political statement about uniting the two countries.