The Geography of Country Names

There’s a pretty clear geographical split in what different countries call Greece. In most of Europe, the name comes from the Latin Graecia. But across North Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia, the name is usually derived from Ionia or Yunan, through Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and related linguistic influences. The split basically reflects two different historical contact routes: western Europe inherited the Roman/Latin name, while the Middle East and much of Asia inherited the Persian name based on the Ionians.

You can explore the geographical differences in how different languages name countries around the world on the Exonym Atlas. The Exonym Atlas groups country names into linguistic and historical “families”, allowing users to see how names spread across cultures, empires, and trade networks. An exonym is a name used by outsiders for a place, person, or language, rather than the name used by the locals (the endonym).

Germany provides another excellent illustration of these linguistic divisions. Depending on where you look on the globe, Germany is called something completely different.

The atlas makes it easy to track these different branches. For instance, English, Russian, and Italian went with versions derived from the Latin Germania (Germany / Германия / Germania). Meanwhile, French, Spanish, and Arabic get their names from the Alamanni, an ancient Germanic tribal confederation.

Then things get really interesting. Slavic languages like Polish and Czech use Niemcy or Německo, which actually comes from a Proto-Slavic word meaning "mute" - essentially meaning "the people who don't speak like us." And finally, you have the native endonym Deutschland, which is shared by Germany's Scandinavian neighbors (Tyskland) and was even picked up and adapted phonetically into East Asian languages like Japanese (Doitsu) and Chinese (Déguó).

Via: The Map Room