What the world calls each other

Germans call their country Deutschland. The French call it Allemagne, the Poles Niemcy, the Finns Saksa, the Lithuanians Vokietija and the Chinese Déguó, which, read character by character, comes out as "virtue country". Each of those names is a small piece of history: who met whom first, through which neighbours, and what they thought of each other. I wanted a map where you can see all of it at once.

Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, stores the name of every country in hundreds of languages. I took the names of all 242 countries and territories on the Natural Earth world map in every language that names at least 100 of them: 262 languages and 32 writing systems. For the meanings I used Wikipedia's list of country-name etymologies and its articles on the names of Germany, China, Greece, Japan and others, and two open dictionaries for the Chinese and Japanese characters. Nothing here is my own etymology. Where no source gives a meaning, the page shows the name and its sound, nothing more.

01 · The mapPick a language, or pick a country

Choose a language to label the whole world in it. Countries in jade are called something that sounds like their own name; those in vermilion are called something else entirely. Switch to "Pick a country" to turn it round: each country is then labelled with what its own main language calls the country you chose, coloured by the family the name belongs to. Click any country for its card: its name in the twenty biggest languages and what it means.

02 · Turning it roundWhat does the world call Germany?

Germany is the champion of many names. I sorted its 261 Wikidata names into the six families described in Wikipedia's article on the names of Germany. Most languages, 137 of them, use a form of the Latin Germania, the Romans' word for the tribes beyond the Rhine. 58 follow the French Allemagne, from the Alamanni tribe: Spanish Alemania, Arabic Almānyā, Turkish Almanya. Only 37 use a form of the Germans' own word, Deutsch, from Old High German diutisc, "of the people": Dutch Duitsland, the Scandinavian Tyskland, Japanese ドイツ Doitsu, Korean 독일 Dogil, Vietnamese Đức and Chinese 德国 Déguó. 18 Slavic and neighbouring languages say Niemcy or Nemačka, from a Slavic word for the speechless or "the mute ones": people whose language the Slavs could not understand. Finnish (Saksa), Estonian and three smaller Finnic and Sami languages, 5 in all, call Germany after the Saxons, and Lithuanian and Latvian have a word of their own, Vokietija and Vācija, of unclear origin.

The families are not my invention: each comes with a quoted sentence from its Wikipedia source, and the build checks every quote word for word. For the 109 languages that the article names under a family, my spelling rules put 99 in the article's family. The ten that differ are cases where the Wikidata label and the article point to different names: Bulgarian and Belarusian, for example, are listed in the article's Niemcy family, but their Wikidata labels are Германия and Германія, Germania forms.

03 · Families of namesFourteen countries, many names

Germany is not alone. I built the same kind of families for thirteen more countries with well documented names. The bars show the share of the 262 languages using each family. Click a bar to map it.

Some patterns jump out. Finland calls itself Suomi, but 243 of its 260 names are forms of the Old Norse "Finland"; only 14, echo Suomi, among them Estonian, Sami, Mari, Mordvin and Komi, its Uralic relatives, and the neighbouring Lithuanian and Latvian. Hungary is Magyarország at home, "land of the Magyars", and 38 languages follow it, from Czech and Croatian to Turkish (Macaristan), Arabic and Persian, while 194 use forms of Hungary, from a Turkic phrase for "ten arrows". The Netherlands is a tug of war: 142 languages borrow Nederland by sound, 42 translate it as "low countries" (Pays-Bas, Países Bajos) and 61 still call the whole country after one of its provinces, Holland. Egypt splits between the Greek Aigyptos, "home of the ka of Ptah" (192 languages), and the ancient Semitic Misr (67), the name Egyptians use themselves.

04 · Virtue country, beautiful countryWhat the characters say, and what they don't

Chinese writes foreign names with characters, and every character has a meaning. So it is tempting to read 美国, the United States, as "beautiful country", and 德国, Germany, as "virtue country". That reading is real, in the sense that a Chinese reader sees those meanings, but it is not where the names come from. 美 is short for 美利堅 Měilìjiān, an early transcription of "America"; 德 is short for 德意志 Déyìzhì, a transcription of "Deutsch". The characters were chosen for their sound, and often for being pleasant to read, which is why so many foreign names in Chinese sound flattering.

I tagged every character in every Chinese country name as either sound or meaning. Of 196 sovereign countries, 163 have names made purely of sound characters, 20 mix sound with a meaning element such as 南 south, 新 new or 岛 island, 5 are short forms like 德国 and 美国, and only 2 are true translations: 冰岛 Iceland, "ice island", and 黑山 Montenegro, "black mountain". 6 are the countries' own names written in characters, such as 日本 and 越南. The glosses below are what each character means on its own, from the CC-CEDICT dictionary: for sound characters, a fun reading, not the name's origin.

Japanese mostly sidesteps the question. 168 of 196 countries (86%) are written in katakana, a script that records sound only: ドイツ Doitsu for Germany, イギリス Igirisu for Britain, from the Portuguese inglês. But older kanji forms survive as short forms, and those do carry meanings: 米国 Beikoku for the United States, which Wikipedia notes "literally translates to 'rice country'" (米 is taken from 亜米利加 A-me-ri-ka), 独 for Germany, 露国 for Russia, 豪州 for Australia, 比島 for the Philippines and 氷島 for Iceland, "ice island" again. Korean and Vietnamese often read the same characters in their own way: Korean 미국 Miguk and 독일 Dogil are 美國 and 獨逸; Vietnamese Đức (Germany) is 德, and Hà Lan (the Netherlands) is 荷蘭. I matched 10 Korean and 17 Vietnamese names to their characters this way, using KANJIDIC2's readings.

05 · Your own nameWhat does your country's name mean?

Turn from what others call a country to what it calls itself. Wikipedia's list of country-name etymologies gives an origin for 193 of the 196 sovereign states on the map. I sorted them, by reading each entry, into rough kinds. The largest group, 60, are descriptions: "united states", "rich coast" (Costa Rica), "black mountain" (Montenegro), "equator" (Ecuador), "edge, borderland" (Ukraine). 47 are named after a people: Poland after the Polans, France after the Franks, Finland after the Finns. 42 take the name of a river, city or other place: India from the Indus, Zambia from the Zambezi, Zimbabwe from the stone houses of Great Zimbabwe. 11 are named after a person, such as Colombia (Columbus), Bolivia (Simón Bolívar), the Philippines (Philip II of Spain) and Saudi Arabia (the House of Saud), and 9 after a saint or Christ, such as El Salvador, "the Saviour". For 16, among them Peru, Cuba and Syria, the list says the origin is uncertain.

06 · StoriesOld names that refuse to die

07 · Called by another nameWhich countries does the world rename?

For most countries the world simply borrows the local name and bends it to its own sounds: Kenya, Peru, Canada. For the typical country, 97% of the other languages use a name that starts with the same consonant sounds as its own, and 120 of the 196 sovereign states are echoed by 95% or more. But 21 are called something different by more than half the world, and 17 by more than three quarters. Among them: Armenia (Hayastan), Albania (Shqipëria), Bhutan (Druk Yul), Greece (Hellas), Georgia (Sakartvelo), Finland (Suomi), Croatia (Hrvatska), Montenegro (Crna Gora), Japan (Nihon), India (Bharat), Germany (Deutschland), Hungary (Magyarország) and Egypt (Misr).

Turn the question round and ask which languages rename the world most. Among the 16 languages with 100 million speakers or more, Chinese stands out: in its traditional and simplified forms, only 66% and 68% of its country names start with the same sounds as the country's own name, against a median of 86% for all core languages. Part of the reason is that Chinese writes foreign sounds with its own syllables and shortens long names: Germany becomes Dé, America Měi, England Yīng. Indonesian is at the other end of the big languages (90%).

08 · MethodsHow I did this, and what to watch for