Why Countries Have Different Names in English | Smartest Year Ever (Oct 2, 2025)
About this episode
Why do we say Germany in English when locals call it Deutschland? Why is Japan “Japan” to us but Nihon in Japanese? And why does Greece go by “Hellas” inside its own borders?
In this episode of Smartest Year Ever, Gordy dives into the fascinating world of exonyms and endonyms—the outsider names and insider names that reveal the tangled history of languages, empires, and trade routes. From Roman labels like Germania, to Portuguese traders shaping “Japan”, to why Ivory Coast officially asked the world to call it Côte d’Ivoire, the names we use for countries tell us as much about outsiders as they do about the people who live there.
This episode covers:
The difference between exonyms vs. endonyms.
Why countries like Germany, Japan, Greece, and Hungary have such different names across languages.
How colonialism, ancient empires, and translation quirks fossilized certain names in English.
The surprising modern cases where naming is still debated.
It’s a crash course in linguistics, geography, and world history—and a reminder that even a country’s name can carry centuries of stories.
Stay curious, stay clever—on our quest to become the world’s greatest conversationalists.
Sources:
Room, A. (2006). Placenames of the world: Origins and meanings of the names for over 5000 natural features, countries, capitals, territories, cities and historic sites. McFarland.
Crystal, D. (2010). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. (2006). Manual for the national standardization of geographical names. United Nations.
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Exonym; Endonym. Merriam-Webster.com.
Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Exonym; Endonym. OED.com.
Government of Côte d’Ivoire. (1985). Official communiqué requesting endonym usage.
#CountryNames #Linguistics #LanguageHistory #DailyFacts #exoynm #endonym #languages #geographyfacts #geography #funfacts Music thanks to Zapsplat.
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