What the World Calls Each Other: Country Names in 262 Languages, and What They Mean

Countries are known abroad by names that often differ from their own: Deutschland is Allemagne, Niemcy and Saksa, Suomi is Finland, Hellas is Yunan. I assemble the Wikidata labels of all 242 countries and territories on the Natural Earth world map in the 262 languages that name at least 100 of them, 54,037 names in all, and ask how often the world echoes a country's own name, which countries and languages depart from it most, and what the names mean where published sources say so. A simple test on the first consonant sounds of romanised names, which agrees with hand-built name families for 95.8% of 3,622 checked names, finds that the typical sovereign state is called by a name like its own in 97% of other languages, but 17 states, among them Germany, Greece, Finland, Japan, Hungary and China, are echoed by fewer than a quarter. For fourteen countries I sort every name into families documented in Wikipedia, with each family's source sentence checked word for word: Germany's 261 names fall into six families, led by forms of Latin Germania (137) and of French Allemagne (58), with only 37 echoing Deutsch. Among large languages, Chinese departs most from countries' own names; of 196 Chinese names for sovereign states, 163 are pure sound transcriptions, and only 2 are translations. Of the 193 sovereign states with an entry in Wikipedia's list of country-name etymologies, 60 are named with a description, 47 after a people and 42 after a place. An interactive map lets readers label the world in any of the languages, or see what every language calls a chosen country. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/country-names/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/country-names. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/country-names/.