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I am making a language app that has different languages with their respective flags. For many languages it's obviously clear which flag to chose (e.g. Dutch, Polish, German) but I'm struggling to find a flag (or otherwise any icon) that represents "Spanish (Latin-America)".

Before I get comments on this: I'm very well aware that there are still vast differences within South-American dialects (Mexican, Colombian, Argentinian, etc. vary significantly), but the industry standard for many translation/localisation applications is to bunch them together under a single "Spanish (Latin-America)" category.

I am trying to come up with an icon that none of the countries would take offence at (e.g. just picking a Colombian flag will undoubtedly piss of some Argentinians and vice versa). I considered taking an icon of just South-America as a continent, but that's equally confusing, cause (1) the biggest country (Brazil) doesn't speak Spanish but Portuguese and (2) it doesn't include Central-America.

Is there a commonly accepted icon/flag/symbol to represent Latin-American Spanish?

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  • I’m voting to close this question because this is not about the Spanish language.
    – Lambie
    Jun 9, 2022 at 18:11
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    @Lambie It is more than tangentially related to the Spanish language, and it is also potentially relevant to those who study Spanish. Until the day there is an languageiconography.stackexchange.com, this really seems like the most appropriate place to post this question.
    – Yellow
    Jun 13, 2022 at 12:53

1 Answer 1

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As far as I know, there's no such icon, you can only speculate with ideas and create one from scratch. In such a case, since we are dealing with countless countries, all of them with different cultures except for the language, the important thing is to find an identifiable and representable common element. In situations like this, if the easy element is solved and the problem is the representation of the difficult one, it may be useful to reverse the process: look for the difficult solution and adapt the easy one. In fact, the Spanish language is spoken in thirty countries, while the Spanish from Spain is only spoken in one.


A common representative and identifying element of the Spanish language is the character "ñ". Using this character we have resolved the icon of the entire Spanish language, it would only be necessary to differentiate it from the Spanish from Spain.

enter image description here


Another common element and easy to represent in all Spanish-speaking countries is colonization, but I would avoid using it to prevent the controversies that it generates in some countries.

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