I was watching an international sporting event where all the players wore shirts with the names of their countries on the backs. The team from Sweden wore shirts that said, “Sverige,” for example.
So, my question is, if their country is called “Sverige,” why do we (I am in North America) call it “Sweden?” Can a country just decide what they are going to refer to another country as? Could the USA one day choose to officially refer to Canada as anything other than “Canada?”
Well, every country has the right to decide what to call themselves in their own language. As for what the name translates to in other languages, that’s up to the people in the other language to decide.
You can call Israel Yisrael is you really want to. But when speaking to an English-speaking audience, you’ll go a lot farther if you use “Israel” instead.
Zev Steinhardt
This was covered in an early Straight Dope book, but about Germany.
Bottom line: The name by which a people calls itself, and the names by which its neighbors call it are often different, and extends back into ancient times.
IMHO Earl Snake-Hips Tucker has nailed it. There’s no strict reason why the USA shouldn’t start calling Canada something else some day, but it’s not very likely given that most Americans already call it Canada.
New differences are no longer likely to occur these days because we have international organisations to belong to. Countries’ name changes are well publicised and we all tend to agree to update our records accordingly. But when contact between nations was less common than it is today we have often chosen different names for our neighbours than they use for themselves for the same reason we speak different languages from theirs.
Sometimes people within a country use different names to describe their homeland. Witness Switzerland.
Back when Nicaragua was a hot topic, you could always tell the political stance of a commentator by the way they pronounced the country’s name. Pro-Sandinista commentators almost always pronounced it with a grossly exagerated Spanish accent, “Neek-a-HRAAAWGH-hwa”, ususally hawking up a good one on the third syllable.
Thanks, everyone!
Yes, I was aware of that other article, but I still had some questions after reading it.
Wouldn’t it seem more courteous to call a country by the name it calls itself? I keep thinking of a former co-worker named Richard who just would not respond to anything other than Richard - not Rich, not Rick (and certainly not Dick).
How do people in (let’s use this as an example again) Sweden feel when their country is referred to as Sweden, even though that’s not what they themselves call it? The USA is proud of the name “United States of America” - would Americans feel slighted if the USA was officially referred to as something other than that?
Also, do countries maintain official documents stating the names it uses to refer to other countries?
And how do we get “Sweden” from “Sverige?”
But the USA IS referred to as something other than that by other nations. The French call it “Les Etats-Unis”, for example.
It’s not a matter of one country calling another country by the “wrong” name; it’s a matter that the same country has different names in different languages. What we call “Finland” is called “Suomi” in Finnish. Neither of us are wrong; the word is just different in the two languages.
Having spent time in Europe, and having met many Europeans, I can’t imagine that anybody could be offended by this.
Ed
I can’t help you with that last question, and maybe some Swedes will be along to explain how they feel about us calling their country by the name we do, but in the meantime, how do you feel knowing that your country is called Les Etats-Unis d’Amérique in Francophone countries, Los Estados Unidos de América in Spanish-speaking ones etc.? (on preview I see suranyi has covered this)
Countries are only likely to become annoyed if we use a name they find insulting. Surely your co-worker had the right to expect you to call him by his name if you knew what it was? In the same way, if we know a country prefers to be called X and we keep calling them Y they are likely to react negatively to that. Generally that might apply when there’s a cultural or government change that results in a country’s name changing and yet we fail to adopt the new name (like Mesopotamia for Iraq or Zaire for Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Having said that, there are names for countries that originally meant “foreigner” or something worse.
I assume that there must be official records kept at a government level to save the official names we give to the countries we deal with.
In reality, no one much minds. I’ve never heard of an American getting upset with a Chinese person referring to the U.S. as mei guo (sorry, no tone marks), or with an Arab saying amrika.
Just dictionaries, atlases, gazeteers, etc. The closest thing you might get to an official document would be something like a United Nations roster of delegates printed in a given language.
We didn’t get Sweden from Sverige. In this case, it’s likely that an older name for the country Sweden was used in English at one time. At first, the English name probably wasn’t all that far off from what the Swedes were calling Sweden. But over time, English speakers made their modifications to the word (changing a suffix, changing sv to a more English sw), and the Swedish word for their country probably changed some as well. So the terms diverged into their modern forms in the respective languages – but almost certainly have a common source.
OED has a little more info, but too much to type.
Apparently, the ‘v’ shifted to a ‘u,’ then later shifted to a ‘w.’ Also, the “d” was a “th” earlier. Also, one of ther earlier names of “Sweden” was “Swede-land,” or some similar spelling. “Sweden” then might just be a short form.
There have been cases when a foreign government tries to get English speakers to use the native name in English. I think I remember seeing Dutch publications in English calling the country “Nederland,” and Turkish government publications in English insist on “Türkiye.” With two dots over the ü.
For my purposes, “Les Etats-Unis” is the SAME as “United States” as it’s a direct translation. I was talking about, say, some other country calling, say, Mexico “Greenvania” or some other name seemingly unrelated to “Mexico.” I do realize that most different names can be traced back to a common source though - very interesting! I’ll have to look up the “Finland” / “Suomi” connection.
I’m not talking wrong or right here - I’m just curious. Thanks for all your replies and interesting insights though!
As an aside, I am Canadian, and while we refer to the people of the USA as “Americans,” I rarely hear a Canadian calling the USA “America.” It’s usually referred to as “The States.”
Being Swedish, I must say I have yet to hear anyone saying that they take offence when some forr-ih-nurrs calls us Sweden or whatnot. I can’t really see why that would be such a big deal. They call us whateever they feel is reasonable, and we call them whatever we feel is reasonable. The full name of the U.S. in Swedish is ‘Amerikas Förenta Stater’, though most simply refer to it as ‘Amerika’ or ‘USA’.
I tried to find information on where the name for Sweden is derived, but it was in vain. Anyhow, I think I’d prefer to hear Sweden called Sweden, rather than hearing its “true” name being butchered by forr-ih-nurrs
There’s a difference with the USA’s name. There are direct translations for the words UNITED and STATES in other languages. I see no problem with Germany calling us Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, etc. I’d have an issue if they had a new word for AMERICA. There no such “thing” as a “CANADA”,beyond that nations name, so no one has an excuse to call that country anything but CANADA.
The OP about SVERIGE/SWEDEN is valid; in English there’s no reason to create a new word for Sverige. I’m not certain on its correct Swedish pronunciation, but I’m sure there’d be a reasonable close English approximation. Ditto for Suomi/Finland.
You could find so many examples of this: Why isn’t the word for
Spain “Espania” in English? Certainly looks pronounceable and darn close to the Spanish?
But I digress: in short, if it’s reasonably pronounceable, use the same damn word as the natives; shows much more respect.
Excuse me quoting myself but…
So a country might be annoyed if you insisted on calling it Greenvania when they’d already asked to be called Mexico, but not if Greenvania had been your version of their name since time immemorial and provided there were no inappropriate connotations for Greenvania.
So what do you call Finland, Spain, Germany etc?
Sadly, I am guilty as the rest of us in using what I was taught in geography classes. But I attempt to discover what a nations “true” name is; I used to collect world postage stamps and pretty much had to learn them in order to identify stamps of other nations. This entailed learning some other alphabets as well.
My post was meant as a suggestion, not one that has any weight with Merriam-Websters or whoever decides these things.
I should also add that I have relatives in a few other countries (all non-English speaking and all different) and have been exposed to other nation names in those other tongues.
I find it quite fascinating.
Well, of course it’s a good thing to learn about other countries, but surely you don’t feel guilty about using a generally recognised country’s name?
Perhaps you should compare your post with essohbee’s. He is Swedish yet he doesn’t mind there being a different English-language name for his country. You say you would “have an issue if they had a new word for AMERICA”, but that seems a little over-sensitive to me. Except that the USA is such a young country that everyone who might refer to it has had plenty of opportunity to hear the name in its official form. That’s why people typically do attempt to call it by a name similar to the original.
But in cases where the English name and mother tongue name differ, the reason is often that many years have passed between today and the first time the country was referred to in English. In that time there has been a natural evolution of language, so both versions of the name have changed (see bordelond’s and Earl Snake-Hips Tucker’s explanations of Sweden). Also, the original name given to a country may have been acceptable at the time it was coined but has since changed in its home language and the original has just stuck in English. That explains Finland and Germany for example.
So long as the foreign language version of a country’s name has an established provenance, and provided it is not inherently insulting there’s no reason to feel guilty about using it or for anyone to “have an issue” with it, and I don’t believe Germans, Finns etc. do generally.