The typical student traveling on a Eurail pass will stop in such lands as Österreich, Italia, Česko and Schweiz — also known as Suisse, Svizzera, and Svizra. If that student happens to hail from the English-speaking world, the names Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic (the recent movement for Czechia notwithstanding), and Switzerland will sound more familiar. But the question inevitably comes to mind while riding between one historically and culturally rich capital to another: where did all these countries get their names in English? How on Earth, for example, did Deutschland, known in certain other European languages as Allemagne, Alemania, or Alemanha, get to be called Germany?
Language YouTuber RobWords has an explanation. “To the Romans, it was the land of the Germani, their name for the weird people speaking gibberish languages to the east of the River Rhine,” he says in the video above, standing in a forest conveniently located in Germany itself.
They “also used the word alemanni to describe a confederation of Germanic people, and that’s where a load of other languages get their word for Germany too.” And the meaning of Deutschland? “Land of the Dutch,” that last actually being the descendant of an old Germanic word meaning ‘popular’ or ‘people’ ” — which, before that time, referred not simply to human beings, but the population who spoke the region’s widely understood “popular languages.”
Behind most every European country’s English name lies a story, if sometimes an ambiguous, contested, and controversial one. Most are also historically illuminating: take Belgium, once considered part of the Netherlands (home of the people we now call Dutch), whose name derives from a tribe, or confederation of tribes, known in Latin as the Belgae: a word “adopted by people living in the southern Low Countries during the region’s struggle for independence from Spain in the sixteenth century.” RobWords has more such surprising facts to reveal in the video just above, in which he breaks down the names of all the countries in the United Kingdom, covering Ireland, Scotland, Wales, his native England, and also the word Britain itself, as well as the Great often attached to it. The latter isn’t a boast, he stresses, but rather a means of distinguishing the island from part of France. As for which part, you’ll have to watch to find out.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
