From Alankomaat to Yunanistan – a linguistic journey through Europe

It’s well known that Germany has different names across the globe: in German it’s Deutschland, Allemagne in French and Saksa in Finnish, which originate from the tribes of the Germanic peoples, Alemanni and Saxons (not to be confused with the modern-day federal state of Saxony). But what’s the case for other European countries?

Let’s start with our closest neighbours: the most frequently used form is based on the Latin, Austria, however in Czech and Slovakian, it is known as Rakousko or Rakúsko. This name goes back to the castle in the frontier town of Raabs an der Thaya, and means something along the lines of ‘Raabs land’. In Arabic, the country is called an-Nimsa, which comes from the Slavic and is based on an adjective meaning ‘silent’. A common explanation for this is the once almost insurmountable language barrier dividing the Proto-Slavic peoples and their Germanic-speaking neighbours. Whereas the Polish Niemcy and Serbian Nemačka actually mean Germany, the word received a different meaning in the Ottoman Empire, which bordered today’s Austria, and thereby got its meaning in modern Arabic.

Helvetii and Hellenes

The foreign-language words for Switzerland are usually based on the German, French or Italian (Suisse, Svizzera). However, the Greeks speak of Elvetia and Romanians of Elveţia, which can be traced back to the Latin Helvetia. This self-designation, based on the Celtic tribe the Helvetii, is used on Swiss coins and stamps, for example, so that none of the various official languages is given a preference.

Greece also has more than one official self-designation on offer, albeit in the same language: the more traditional Hellas and the somewhat more modern Ellada. Throughout Europe, the country is however usually known by names such as Greece, Grèce, etc., which goes back to the Latin Graecus and possibly refers to an ancient tribe. In Turkey, people speak of Yunanistan: a word that can be traced back to the ancient Greek Ionians, who settled in what is modern-day Turkey and lent the Ionian Sea its name.

Amongst the illustrious countries whose self-designation hardly left a mark outside their own borders are – alongside Shqipëria (Albania), Hayastan (Armenia), Sakartwelo (Georgia) as well as the parts of the United Kingdom Cymru (Wales) and Alba (Scotland) – Hungary and Finland. While the Hungarians refer to themselves as Magyars, which also makes up the name of the country Magyarország, the Latin name Hungaria is the usual source of inspiration internationally, again a fall-back to the old tribal name. For the ‘land of a thousand lakes’, the Swedish name Finland is usually used, which originally referred to a Finnish province and not the Finnish word Suomi. This was probably facilitated by the fact that what is today officially a bilingual country only used to have Swedish as its official language for a long time.

Wends and Walhaz

The Finnish word for Sweden is however more etymologically complex: Ruotsi can be traced back to a word meaning ‘to row’ and possibly describes a coastal region in Sweden. As it was commonly believed, the Finnish term gave rise to the territorial name (Kievan) Rus, from which modern-day Russia developed. In Finnish, on the other hand, Russia is known as Venäjä, which goes back to the Germanic Wends’ word used to denote Slavic peoples and sometimes still used today for the Sorbian minority in Lower Lusatia region in Germany.

There are further examples of names derived from old tribal words in Europe. Poland is called Lengyelország in Hungarian, which probably comes from the Lendians. In both Hungarian and Polish, however, Italia (Italy) has its own name: Olaszország and Włochy. Why is this? Both terms can be traced back to the same root word, just as the German word welsch; Walhaz used to refer to Germany’s Latin-speaking neighbours (France and Italy). The word was used elsewhere within the meaning of ‘foreign-language’, so that the names for Wales, Wallonia and Wallachia can be traced back to it – just like the Italian Welsh nut, or walnut.

The source of the Greek name for France, Gallía, is clearly the Gauls. The etymology of the Hebrew term Zarfat, on the other hand, is from biblical times and – the circumstances here not being quite clear – can be traced back to a town in what is Lebanon today. Just as unclear is the Hebrew name for Spain, Sfarad. Easier to understand – as we are already geographically on the Iberian Peninsula – is the name Ureno for Portugal in Swahili, which comes from the Portuguese reino, meaning ‘kingdom’ in English.

Black mountain and White Rus

Last but not least, there are still countries, where the etymological building blocks can be found in the dictionary. This is how a ‘black mountain’ lent its name to a small country in the Adriatic Crna Gora, which is known outside the Slavic countries as Montenegro. The name was however literally translated in Turkish (Karadağ) and Islandic (Svartfjallaland). A similar fate has befallen the country known as Belarus – literally ‘White Rus’ – which is also known as Lefkorosia, Hviderusland and White Russia within Europe.

Countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom also have a hard time escaping the broad-ranging interpretations of their name. The word Nederland is sometimes Pays-Bas or Paesi Bassi, and sometimes Nizozemsko or Alankomaat – if you do not want to use the somewhat geographically incorrect term Holland. The Brits and Northern Irish are confronted with terms for their country such as Birleşik Krallık, Reino Unido or especially Royaume-Uni at the Grand Prix.

However, different-looking names do not always have to have different roots: Chorwacja, Hırvatistan, Horvátország and Croatia, for example, are all based on the same word, Hrvatska.