Paraguay Emoji & Symbols

The Paraguay flag emoji 🇵🇾 shows three horizontal bands of red, white and blue with the national coat of arms in the middle. The colours are usually explained as courage and patriotism (red), peace and unity (white) and liberty (blue). Without its emblem the tricolour looks much like the flag of the Netherlands, which is why the small badge in the centre matters.

Paraguay's flag is the only current national flag with a different design on each side, which is what people mean when they search for the Paraguay flag both sides. The front carries the coat of arms: a yellow five-pointed star, the Estrella de Mayo that recalls the May 1811 independence, inside a wreath of palm and olive branches with the words República del Paraguay. The back carries the seal of the Treasury: a lion sitting beside a pole topped with a red liberty cap, under the motto Paz y Justicia, peace and justice. Emoji designs draw the front.

Behind the scenes 🇵🇾 is two regional indicator letters, P and Y, the country code PY. Phones and Macs join them into a flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font and shows the letters PY instead. Where the flag does not show, Paraguayans type the colours: ❤️🤍💙 or 🔴⚪🔵 under every Albirroja goal and around 14 and 15 May.

Paraguay national symbols: the May star, the lion, the bellbird

The 1992 constitution names three national symbols: the flag, the national seal and the national anthem. In emoji that becomes ⭐ for the Estrella de Mayo of the coat of arms and 🦁 for the lion of the Treasury seal. The national bird is the pájaro campana, the bare-throated bellbird, whose loud metallic call carries across the forest like a struck bell: 🐦🔔. The mburucuyá or passion flower is widely named as the national flower and has no emoji of its own.

Two trees colour the country. The pink lapacho flowers in late winter, before its leaves come, and turns whole avenues of Asunción pink 🌸; the pindó palm 🌴 stands in the fields and along the roads of the countryside and has a place in Guarani tradition.

Tereré, chipa and sopa paraguaya: Paraguay food emoji

No emoji says Paraguay like 🧉🧊🌿. Tereré is yerba mate (the plant's scientific name is Ilex paraguariensis) drunk cold: a guampa cup packed with yerba, ice water poured from a thermos, often with pounded medicinal herbs, the pohã ñana, passed around a circle through one metal straw. In 2020 UNESCO put the practices and knowledge of tereré in the culture of pohã ñana on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and the last Saturday of February is National Tereré Day. Hot mate 🧉 is for cold winter mornings.

Chipa is the national bread: a ring or bun of cassava starch, cheese, egg and anise, sold from baskets by chiperas on buses and at road junctions and baked by the hundred for Holy Week. There is no chipa emoji, so people use 🧀🥯 for the ring. Sopa paraguaya, despite its name, is not a soup but a firm cornbread of maize meal, cheese, onion, eggs and milk 🌽🧀🧅, served with the Sunday asado 🥩🔥; chipa guasu is its fresh-corn cousin and mbejú a flat cassava-and-cheese cake 🥞. 🍲 is vori vori, chicken soup with little balls of corn and cheese. Street food is asadito 🍢, a grilled meat skewer often served with mandioca (cassava) on the side, and empanadas 🥟. Mandioca itself, eaten boiled at almost every meal, has no emoji.

Summer in Asunción smells of mangoes 🥭 falling from the trees along the streets; watermelon 🍉 is sold from trucks by the roadside, and bitter oranges 🍊 become kosereva, peel candied in sugarcane molasses. To drink there is beer 🍺 and caña 🥃, the sugarcane spirit; on 1 August many families take a sip of caña con ruda, caña steeped with rue 🥃🌿, to see them through the rest of winter.

Itaipú, Asunción, the missions and the Chaco

Asunción, founded in 1537 on the Paraguay River, is called the Mother of Cities because expeditions set out from it to found others, Buenos Aires among them; 🏛️ stands for the Palacio de los López and the Panteón de los Héroes. Down the Paraná, the Itaipú dam, shared with Brazil, is one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, and with Yacyretá, shared with Argentina, it makes almost all of Paraguay's electricity from water ⚡💧. 🛶🚢🎣🐟 are the rivers: barges, ferries and the dorado and surubí that anglers come for, in a country that has no sea coast.

⛪🧱 are the red sandstone ruins of the Jesuit missions of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue, on UNESCO's World Heritage list. 🛍️💱🌉 are Ciudad del Este, the shopping city at the Friendship Bridge to Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil; 🏖️🪶🎉 are Encarnación, with its beaches on the Paraná and its feathered carnival.

West of the Paraguay River lies the Chaco, thorn forest, palm savanna and cactus 🌵🌳, more than half of the country's land but home to only a small part of its people: cattle ranches 🐄🐎 and the Mennonite colonies around Filadelfia and Loma Plata, where German is still spoken. In the east soybeans 🫘 cover the farmland. The wild side of Paraguay is the jaguar 🐆 (yaguareté in Guarani), the Chacoan peccary 🐗, the yacaré caiman 🐊, macaws and parakeets 🦜, howler monkeys 🐒 and clouds of butterflies 🦋.

Ñandutí, harp and fiestas: Paraguay cultural symbols

Ñandutí, Guarani for spider web, is the fine needle lace of Itauguá, worked in circles of radiating threads: 🕸️🧵. The Paraguayan harp 🪉 is the national instrument, played with the guitar 🎸 in the polka paraguaya and the slow guarania, the song form created by José Asunción Flores in the 1920s; the bottle dance, in which dancers 💃🕺 balance bottles stacked on their heads, is a favourite of folk shows.

On 8 December hundreds of thousands of pilgrims travel 🚶🙏🕯️ to the basilica of the Virgin of Caacupé, with some covering part of the way on foot. In June the fiestas of San Juan light up schools and neighbourhoods with fire games: pelota tatá, a flaming ball kicked across the yard ⚽🔥, toro candil, a man in a bull costume with burning horns 🐂, walking on embers, and kambuchi jejoka, breaking a hanging clay pot full of sweets with a stick, blindfolded 🪅. Independence is celebrated on 14 and 15 May 🎆🎉, and 15 May is also Mother's Day 💐.

Football ⚽ is followed with passion: the national team is the Albirroja after its red-and-white striped shirt, the great club rivalry is Olimpia against Cerro Porteño, and South American football's confederation, CONMEBOL, has its headquarters in Luque, next to Asunción. 🧤 is for José Luis Chilavert, the goalkeeper who scored dozens of goals from free kicks and penalties. 🏎️🏁 is the Transchaco Rally across the dusty Chaco tracks.

Paraguay currency symbol ₲ and how to type Guarani letters

The Paraguay currency symbol is ₲, the guaraní sign, Unicode U+20B2 (HTML ₲); the currency code is PYG. On price tags and receipts you will see it written Gs. or ₲ before the amount, with dots between thousands: ₲ 50.000. The currency is named after the Guarani people, as is the language.

Paraguay is officially bilingual, Spanish and Guarani, and CLDR estimates around 6 million speakers of Guarani in a population of about 6.5 million, an exception in the Americas, where Guarani is spoken by most people, not only by indigenous communities. CLDR also counts around 220,000 speakers of German. Spanish needs á é í ó ú ü ñ and ¿ ¡; see the Spanish collection. Guarani (avañe'ẽ, the people's language) has six vowels, with y as the sixth, and marks nasal vowels with a tilde: ã ẽ ĩ õ ũ ỹ, as in tetã (country) and ñe'ẽ (word). The nasal g̃ has no ready-made letter; it is g followed by the combining tilde U+0303. The glottal stop, the puso, is an apostrophe: CLDR lists the modifier letter ʼ, and in everyday writing people type ' or ’, as in ka'a (yerba) and mba'e (thing). An acute marks stress when it does not fall on the last syllable, as in Mba'éichapa. The Guarani collection lists the whole alphabet.

To type them: phones give ñ, á and ã on a long-press of n, a and other vowels, but ẽ ĩ ũ ỹ and g̃ are often missing, so copy them from the grid above. On Windows, Alt+164 gives ñ and Alt+165 Ñ; the US-International layout gives ã õ ñ with ~ followed by the letter. On a Mac, Option+N then the letter gives ñ ã õ. In HTML, ñ ã õ work by name, and ẽ is ẽ, ĩ ĩ, ũ ũ, ỹ ỹ.