Panama in other languages: Panamá, Panama City, flag and provinces

Panamá, Panama, Panamà: one word, three accents

Few country names travel with so little change. 70 languages in the list write plain Panama, from English and Czech to Welsh, Hausa and Tagalog, and another group keeps the Spanish stress mark of Panamá: Portuguese, Galician, Asturian, Guarani and Tetum among them. Catalan, Italian, Friulian, Occitan and Sicilian turn the acute into a grave and write Panamà, which marks the same stress on the last syllable.

The changes that do occur are grammatical. Greek gives the country a masculine ending, Παναμάς (Panamás), while the capital stays Παναμά (Panamá). Esperanto adds its noun ending in Panamo, Volapük builds Panamän, Manx puts the article in front and lenites the first consonant in Yn Phanamaa. Arabic has two spellings side by side, باناما (Bānāmā) and the shorter بنما (Banamā), and Hebrew likewise lists פנמה and פאנאמה.

In the capital table the Spanish Ciudad de Panamá is translated word for word in many languages: Panama-Stadt in German, Panamaváros in Hungarian, Kota Panama in Indonesian, Cathair Phanama in Irish, while Arabic, Hindi, Japanese and Thai borrow the English Panama City.

From nine provinces to ten, and the comarcas

The 2016 edition of this list still counted nine provinces and five indigenous territories. Panamá Oeste, formed on 1 January 2014 from five districts of Panamá Province with its capital at La Chorrera, had been coded PA-10 by ISO in November 2014; Naso Tjër Di, a comarca established on 4 December 2020, followed as PA-NT in November 2021.

The Guna comarca on the Caribbean coast has carried three names in the standard: Comarca de San Blas with the code PA-0 until 2010, then Kuna Yala as PA-KY, and Guna Yala since 2017. Two further Guna territories, Madungandí in Panamá Province and Wargandí in Darién, rank as corregimientos and therefore have no ISO code of their own.