With the Vancouver Olympics coming to a close, I figured I had better ask a question that has been in the back of my mind.
I am an American, but I think most Americans know the first two words of the Canadian National Anthem.
Which got me thinking. The Star Spangled Banner doesn’t mention America or even the US by name. Germany, IIRC has at least one instance when it mentions “Germany” twice in a row. I believe Canada has a second instance of “O Canada!” from what I can discern from the Olympic coverage.
What National Anthem mentions it’s country, by name, the most number of times?
The first verse of O Canada (the traditionally sung verse) actually says ‘Canada’ four times. (English version.) It also contains Canadian metaphors such as ‘true north’.
I don’t believe the traditionally sung verse of the Marseillaise mentions France by name at all, and “God Save the King/Queen” doesn’t mention the UK. So those are out.
It’s only once in French. And the second verse mentions “the Canadian”, but nowhere else in the song is Canada mentioned.
Before I read the OP, I thought it would be about which national anthem is best representative of its country in its entirety. For this I cannot nominate the original French version of O Canada, which is a 19th century French-Canadian patriotic song, making it both hopelessly passé and not representative of the whole country.
Advance Australia Fair mentions “Australia” 4 times in its 2 verses, and once in the title. It also has “Australians” once and “Commonwealth” (meaning the Commonwealth of Australia) once.
If we learned nothing else from Borat, we at least learned that the Kazhakhstan national anthem mentions their glorious homeland no fewer than 10 times.
Not that it didn’t eventually acquire that reputation, but when written, ‘Deutschland’ wasn’t yet a country; the song was meant to focus on this concept above all others when trying to unify the state. Although it does expand the expected borders of that state - from part of the Netherlands to almost all of Poland, and from part of Denmark down to Italy. So give it points for that.
The current official version is the third verse. It uses the phrase das deutsche Vaterland (German fatherland) only twice. The whole song uses some variation of the country name 6 times, with 8 more uses of ‘German’ as an adjective (German wine, women, and song).
To statsman1982 - deutsches is just a declined form of ‘German’ as an adjective das deutsche -> deutsches, more or less.
But the English translation most familiar to me begins with “Ye Sons of France…” I don’t speak French and I’m unfamiliar with the verbatim meaning of the first line.
To extend the OPs’s question a bit, hoping not to rise to the level of a hijack …
All national anthems are marketing puffery. The message is universally “We’re good / great / whatever because of our …”
So which anthem, current or past, is the most nationalistic? Which one goes farthest into “We be totally cool, you be 10zers! We kick yo ass!” territory? Mentioning your own country name a lot, as the OP asks, is a start down that road. But an anthem can go a lot farther than that if it tries.
I’d wager the North Koreans are a good first guess for front runner. Then I checked the link provided by Captain Amazing above: http://www.nationalanthems.info/kp’.htm More tame than I expected. Anyone?
