Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.
Hello, dear learners! This week on Dear Duolingo, we're answering a popular question that has been on your minds about many countries and languages. Do you know the answer… or, the answers?
This week's question:

This question extends far beyond language to culture, politics, and history—so I'll share the linguistic perspective! The issue of a country's name is closely related to who counts as “in charge,” both of the language and of the country. Often, a community's own name for their home is forcibly changed due to colonization, and what a community calls themselves is often different from what their neighbors call them. (That phenomenon alone is an interesting story, if you're interested!)
Here, we'll mostly focus on countries, but these factors also influence place names like regions and cities—and the names we use for languages, too.
It's also not always the case that places have a single name, even for their inhabitants! Especially in multilingual communities, there can be different pronunciations or even totally different names. The Spanish city of Barcelona is an example: The European Spanish pronunciation of the city name involves pronouncing the “c” like the “th” in English thing, but the city itself is in the Catalan-speaking region of Catalonia, and in Catalan the “c” is pronounced as an “s”! So the Spanish pronunciation of Barcelona can sound pretty different from the Catalan pronunciation of Barcelona.
Here are some more reasons why our pronunciations of other countries’ names don't always match their own!
1. Pronunciation challenges
Just like other words in the language, country names in a different language can be filled with sounds different from the ones we have in English. Sometimes, these are entirely distinct sounds—like the Spanish pronunciation of Costa Rica, with a trilled “r” that isn't like anything in many varieties of English.
But it's also really common for languages to have sounds similar to ones we have in English… and so would we then learn an Italian version of “t” (with no or little puff of air) to pronounce Italia, the Italian name for Italy? And if we stick to our own English pronunciation of the “t,” does that really count as using Italian’s name for the country? 🤷🏻♀️ What a great philosophical question!
Swapping similar sounds might seem reasonable for us as non-Costa Ricans or non-Italians, but hearing the reverse—like a Spanish- or Italian-accented pronunciation of United States—might not seem close enough to count as the “same.”
2. Writing challenges
Another reason that it's not so simple to use a country's own name in our language is for orthographic reasons: Would we write names with their own characters, spellings, and extra marks (like accents)?
We do sometimes use a place's own spelling—as in the English names for France, Portugal, Tanzania, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and Corsica—even if we use very Anglicized pronunciations, but we typically omit or adapt letters and characters that don't exist in English. So you won't see ñ in Spain (which is España in Spanish), ú in Perú, or é in México. There are also plenty of cases where we *could* spell out the country name (Sverige for Sweden, Deutschland for Germany, Italia for Italy)... but we just don't! And in fact, even if we did, those languages use other sounds for the letters we share, so even using their spellings wouldn't guarantee the “right” pronunciation.
Of course, many country names are spelled with an entirely different writing system from our own, and then it gets really complicated to figure out how to represent the country's own pronunciation in a different writing system! For example, even though there are systems for representing Arabic letters in the Roman alphabet, some Arabic sounds just don't exist in English. The Arabic name for Iraq is العراق [al-3iraaq], with the sound ع(represented with 3 and pronounced further back in the throat than any English sounds) and ق at the end (written with “q” and also further in the throat the “k” we pronounce in the English name).
That would also mean that English speakers would need to know about transcription conventions for Arabic sounds—which is just what people studying Arabic might learn!
3. Translations for clarity
Sometimes, place names include parts or phrases that can be translated, which makes them clear in the other language. That's the case with the Spanish name for South Africa, Sudáfrica: The Spanish word for “south” is sur, which becomes sud- in a prefix before a (like in Sudamérica for “South America”).
Language learners may also have the experience of not “getting” a name in their own language until they learn names in a new language. English speakers who don't know much about the history or geography of the Netherlands might learn the Spanish name for the country—los Países Bajos (the low-lying countries)—and then realize the English name is nether + lands for the same reason! 💡
4. Lack of consensus
As is the case for Barcelona (and Ibiza, too!), there are also many cases where there isn't a single pronunciation of a country's name, even among the country's population. Even for countries with a single national language, there may be dialect and accent differences within the country that affect the country's name.
Another example is France: This country name is pronounced with one syllable in standard French, but for many people in southern France, it has two syllables (thanks to influence from the Occitan language). So, is one version more “correct” than the other, and which should other languages choose for its pronunciation? It doesn't really seem like the place of other languages to decide!
There are also countries whose names have multiple pronunciations even within the standard—for example, in Tanzania you'll hear both TanzaNIa (with the “ni” stressed) and TanZAnia (with the “za” stressed”).
There's also bound to be changes in pronunciation over time—pronunciation change is inevitable! And that's true across both languages: The language spoken in the country will change over the decades and centuries, and English sounds will change, too. It might be pretty difficult to commit English speakers to keeping up with the pronunciation changes of another language!
5. Historical relics
Ok, I think this reason is the most fascinating 🤓 There are some country names that vary wildly around the world in different languages, for reasons related to history, political boundaries, and culture, as well as due to language.
Germany is a great example of this. Throughout Europe, words for Germany and the German language have many different roots:
Language | Name for Germany | Name for the German language |
---|---|---|
German | Deutschland | Deutsch |
English | Germany | German |
Finnish | Saksa | saksa |
French | Allemagne | allemand |
Italian | Germania | tedesco |
Polish | Niemcy | niemiecki |
Portuguese | Alemanha | alemão |
Russian | Германия (Germaniya) |
немецкий (nemetskiy) |
Spanish | Alemania | alemnán |
Swedish | Tyskland | tyska |
How does that happen?!
Part of the story is political: Germany wasn’t unified as a country until the late 1800s, and before then, modern-day Germany was actually dozens of smaller nations, duchies, and kingdoms—but there was no “Germany” the way we think of it today, and what counted as “German” as an ethnicity (and as a language, too) evolved over time and competed with other country and place names (like Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover, etc).
So where did all these names come from? The roots of German, alemán, Saksa, and niemiecki all reflect the different Germanic tribes that spread throughout central and northern Europe.
- The Alemanni were a tribe or group of tribes in eastern France and Switzerland—and so the people who would have been in contact with the Alemanni have words for “German” and “Germany” related to that tribe!
- The Germani were a tribe that may not have been Germanic at all! This was the word used in Latin for a particular group of people in northern Europe, and many European languages inherited this root for their own words for “German” and “Germany.”
- The Saxon were a Germanic tribe in northern Europe… who eventually made their way west to the British Isles and took their language with them.
But these weren't the only words for specific Germanic tribes, the regions where some of those tribes lived, or otherwise related to those groups. Many of the languages and dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes had a word like thiudisk for referring to a group of people, like a tribe. This word evolved in different ways in the different Germanic languages, giving rise to a few more words that were adapted to refer to modern-day Germany and the German language:
- It became Dutch—which confusingly does not refer to Germany or the German language anymore—but it used to! 😵💫 It was in use in English in the 1300s to refer to Germanic northern Europeans, and a few centuries later its meaning had evolved to mean only some of those Germanic peoples—the ones living in modern-day Netherlands.
- It became Tysk in the Scandinavian languages (who themselves also come from northern Germanic tribes!).
- It evolved into tedesco in Italian, which is today the Italian word for the German language.
And as for the Slavic words for Germany and German, those Nemet-ish words come from an Old Slavic word for quiet or mute—possibly used for foreigners, because they didn't speak (properly)... which is to say, they didn't speak Slavic! 😅 Interestingly, this Slavic-origin (and sort of Slavic-language-centric) word is the one that evolved into the Arabic name for another part of the German-speaking world: an-Nimsa for "Austria"!
Language is the name of the game!
Our names for countries and languages are little linguistic time capsules that capture a country's political and linguistic history and our own language's relation to that history!
For more answers to your language and pronunciation questions, get in touch with us by emailing dearduolingo@duolingo.com.