Uruguay in other languages: exonyms, flag, ISO codes, 19 departments

A river name from Guaraní

The country is named after the Río Uruguay, and the river name comes from Guaraní. Its meaning is disputed: one reading is "river of the uru", a word for wild fowl; another links it to uruguá, a river snail that was common on its banks. The poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín popularised "river of painted birds", a reading that historians doubt but that the country still quotes.

Under Spanish rule the land east of the river was the Banda Oriental, the Eastern Bank, and for a short time the Provincia Oriental. The independent state kept that orientation in its title: República Oriental del Uruguay means the republic east of the Uruguay. English renders it as Oriental Republic or Eastern Republic of Uruguay.

Because the name is short and phonetic, few languages change much more than the spelling of the w-sound. Portuguese, Catalan and Galician write Uruguai; Croatian and Slovenian Urugvaj; Polish and Maltese Urugwaj; Icelandic Úrúgvæ. Russian and most languages written in Cyrillic use Уругвай, Ukrainian and Rusyn Уруґвай with the letter ґ. Arabic shows the widest spread in the table, from أوروغواي (Ūrūġuwāy) to أوروجواى, written with a g.

The hill in the name of Montevideo

All explanations of Montevideo agree on the first half: monte is the Cerro de Montevideo, the hill across the bay from the old town. The second half has at least four stories. The best known, Portuguese monte vide eu, "I saw a mountain", is rejected by most specialists. A Latin variant, montem video, has the same weakness.

The oldest written trace is in the log of Francisco de Albo, boatswain on Magellan's voyage, who in January 1520 noted a hill shaped like a hat that the crew named Montevidi. The historian Rolando Laguarda Trías proposed a chart abbreviation instead, Monte VI De Este a Oeste, the sixth hill seen sailing west; no document confirms it.

Most languages borrow the Spanish word unchanged. Portuguese adapts it to Montevidéu, Lithuanian adds its noun ending in Montevidėjas, Aymara writes Muntividëw, and Chinese builds it from five characters chosen for sound, 蒙得維的亞.

The flag of Uruguay and the Sun of May

The national flag, officially the Pabellón Nacional, has nine horizontal stripes of white and blue and a white canton with the Sun of May. Sixteen rays leave the sun, alternately straight and wavy. Joaquín Suárez designed it; a law of 18 December 1828 introduced it with nineteen stripes, and a law of 11 July 1830 cut them to nine. Two further flags are official beside it, the Artigas flag and the flag of the Treinta y Tres.

The flag shown here follows the drawing on Wikimedia Commons in its geometry and colours.