Exonyms vs. Endonyms: 20 Places That Hate What You Call Them

Exonyms vs. Endonyms: Why Place Names Spark Fierce Debate

An exonym is a name for a place used by people outside it; an endonym is the name used by the people who live there.

• Exonym: what outsiders call a place
• Endonym: what locals call it

Germany is the English exonym; Deutschland is the German endonym. Same country, two names, two different histories.

These names carry more than pronunciation. They hold identity, memory, and political weight, which is why a place's name can become a matter of pride, protest, or outright correction. The same pressure shapes how we name the people themselves — see our look at countries whose demonyms aren't what you think.

What follows is a tour of 20 places that resist or reject the names outsiders have given them.

Official Rebrands: 4 Places That Changed Their Exonym by Law

Türkiye. In 2022, the country formally asked the United Nations and other international bodies to use Türkiye in place of Turkey. The reasoning was partly about restoring the endonym used domestically since the republic's founding, and partly about escaping an English word that means both a large bird and, as a verb, to fail badly. The rebrand was a bid to shed centuries of accidental mockery every time a diplomat wrote the country's name.

Eswatini. King Mswati III announced the change from Swaziland in 2018, replacing the colonial-era English exonym with the siSwati name meaning "land of the Swazis." The shift was a straightforward assertion of identity: the kingdom was never named for a European explorer, and its people preferred the name they had always used themselves.

Czechia. In 2016, the country adopted Czechia as its short English name, matching the pattern of France rather than French Republic. The formal title, Czech Republic, remains correct for legal and diplomatic documents, but Czechia serves everyday usage. The short form had been in informal circulation for years; the change simply gave it official standing.

North Macedonia. The 2019 Prespa Agreement with Greece settled a decades-long dispute by adding North to the country's name, resolving Greek objections that Macedonia implied a claim on its own northern province. The endonym shifted alongside the exonym, and the country's official name became North Macedonia in all languages.

Colonial Exonyms: 4 Places That Reclaimed Their Endonyms

Independence didn't just redraw borders; it redrew the labels. Four nations dropped colonial exonyms for endonyms that carried history, geography, or self-description back into their own hands.

Zimbabwe

• Colonial exonym: Rhodesia, after the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes
• Independence year: 1980
• Endonym meaning: Zimbabwe, from Shona structures meaning "houses of stone"
• Why the change mattered: Rhodesia tied the country's identity to a colonizer; the Great Zimbabwe ruins tied it to its own stonework and past.

Namibia

• Colonial exonym: South West Africa, a descriptive placeholder under South African administration
• Independence year: 1990
• Endonym meaning: Namibia, from the Namib Desert, the arid coastal strip that defines the country
• Why the change mattered: The old name was a coordinate on someone else's map; the new one claimed a landscape that belongs to no one else.

Burkina Faso

• Colonial exonym: Upper Volta, named for the river that runs north through it
• Independence year: 1984, three years after independence from France
• Endonym meaning: Burkina Faso, from Mòoré and Dyula meaning "land of upright people"
• Why the change mattered: The colonial name was hydrographic and administrative; the replacement asserted character rather than coordinates.

Ghana

• Colonial exonym: Gold Coast, a mercantile label drawn from the region's trade
• Independence year: 1957
• Endonym meaning: Ghana, borrowed from the ancient Ghana Empire that flourished farther north
• Why the change mattered: The Gold Coast named a commodity; Ghana named an inheritance, linking the new state to West Africa's earliest imperial history alongside the extinct demonyms of empires that no longer exist.

Native Endonyms vs. English Exonyms: 4 Countries That Prefer Their Own Name

Country names carry two stories: the one outsiders tell, and the one a place tells about itself. An exonym is a name applied from outside; an endonym is the name used within. When the two diverge, the local form usually wins in that country's own language — and sometimes in English too.

Germany — Deutschland

"Germany" descends from the Latin Germania, a Roman label for the tribal lands east of the Rhine. Germans themselves say Deutschland, from the Old High German diutisc, meaning "of the people" — literally, the land of us, as opposed to them. The English exonym survives because Latin was the language of scholarship, while Deutschland remained the everyday word. German style guides, passports, and official correspondence all use the endonym, and English writers follow suit when referring to the modern state.

Japan — Nippon / Nihon

Nippon and Nihon are two readings of the same characters, meaning "origin of the sun" — the land where the sun begins. The name appears in Japanese documents going back over a thousand years. "Japan" arrived indirectly: a Mandarin pronunciation of the same word traveled along trade routes, reached Portuguese cartographers as Japão, and was anglicized from there. Japanese institutions overwhelmingly prefer Nihon in everyday speech and Nippon in official and emphatic contexts, though both are correct.

China — Zhongguo

Zhongguo translates as "middle kingdom," positioning the country at the center of civilization — a worldview encoded in the name itself. "China" has murkier roots, likely tracing through Sanskrit and Persian forms of Qin, the dynasty that unified the country in the third century BCE. English follows the exonym; Chinese speakers, documents, and the country's own English-language diplomacy increasingly favor China as a translation but retain Zhongguo in Chinese.

India — Bharat

The Republic of India's constitution recognizes Bharat as an official name, drawn from Sanskrit for a legendary emperor whose realm gave the subcontinent its name. "India" flows through Greek Indos and Persian renders of the same river name. Hindi speakers use Bharat constantly; English alternates between both.

Regional and Indigenous Names: 4 Places Where the Endonym Is a Political Statement

“Wales” comes from an Old English word meaning “foreigner” or “outsider,” applied by Anglo-Saxon settlers to the Britons who remained west of the border. The endonym, Cymru, is older and self-defined: it derives from a Brythonic word for “compatriot” or “fellow countryman.” The two names describe the same land from opposite sides of a conquest.

• Welsh language activism has made bilingual signage, broadcasting, and education a matter of public policy, and the language now holds official status in Wales.
• Cymru is the official name of the country in Welsh-language contexts, and the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) uses it without translation.
• Using the endonym signals recognition that Welsh identity was never superseded, only administratively overshadowed.

New Zealand — Aotearoa

“New Zealand” was a Dutch cartographer's rendering of the province of Zeeland. Aotearoa, commonly glossed as “land of the long white cloud,” is the Māori name recorded in early oral tradition and now appears alongside the English one on official documents, road signs, and in Parliament.

• Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand and has seen growing official use, including in bilingual ceremony and government publishing.
• Māori-language place names are increasingly restored on maps, reversing nineteenth-century renaming.
• The dual usage reflects a constitutional argument about whose first account of a place counts.

Georgia — Sakartvelo

“Georgia” likely reached Europe through Persian or Arabic forms, its exact origin disputed. Sakartvelo, meaning “land of the Kartvelians,” is the name Georgians use for their own country in every Kartvelian language.

• In 2018, Georgia's constitution was amended to specify the country's name as Sakartvelo in the official Georgian-language text.
• The change framed an existing endonym as a matter of state, not merely of custom.
• It followed decades of advocacy by linguists and writers who treated the exonym as a residue of outside administration.

Armenia — Hayastan

“Armenia” descends through Greek and Latin from the name of the Armenian people. Hayastan is built on Hayk, the legendary patriarch of the Armenian nation in the Book of Genesis tradition, with the Iranian suffix -stan meaning “land of.”

• Hayastan ties the modern republic directly to a mythic lineage rather than to a classical foreign label.
• Armenians use the endonym in everyday speech while recognizing the exonym internationally.
• The name functions as a claim of continuity across a diaspora scattered by displacement.

City Exonyms: 4 Cities That Want Their Local Name Back

Four cities have made the correction in writing, and each one did it for a different reason.

Kyiv, not Kiev

"Kiev" is a transliteration filtered through Russian, and Ukraine has spent years pushing back against it. The KyivNotKiev campaign, launched in 2018, asked foreign media, airlines, and mapmakers to switch to the Ukrainian-derived spelling. That same year, Ukraine's government formalized the standard transliteration of Київ as "Kyiv" for official English use. The campaign worked quickly: most major news organizations and several style guides changed course within months. The case is a clean example of a country reclaiming the spelling of its own capital rather than accepting the version its neighbor's language produced.

Mumbai, not Bombay

The rename came from within. In November 1995, the Maharashtra state government restored "Mumbai," the name derived from the local goddess Mumbadevi. "Bombay" was a Portuguese-era corruption, and by the 1990s it read as a colonial leftover. The change was contested for years — some residents and institutions kept the old name — but the official preference has held for three decades.

Beijing, not Istanbul's counterpart in transliteration

"Peking" was the Wade-Giles-era spelling that dominated Western atlases. When China adopted the pinyin romanization system internationally in 1979, 北京 became "Beijing" on maps, in newspapers, and in diplomatic documents. Pinyin was designed to represent Mandarin sounds systematically, so the shift was less about politics than about consistency.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

Turkey standardized "Istanbul" in 1930, replacing "Constantinople" in official usage. The city had been called Istanbul informally for centuries — the Ottoman Turkish phrase İstanbul simply meant "the city" — but the 1930 decree made the endonym the legal one, and foreign governments followed.

Writers tracking these shifts will want the same precision when handling people as well as places; see our guide to demonym, nationality, and ethnicity.

Why Endonyms Matter and How to Use Them Respectfully

A place's name is the first thing it says about itself, and the last thing most outsiders bother to learn. Endonyms carry the weight of how a community identifies — in its own language, on its own terms — which is why governments petition the United Nations, why newspapers rewrite style guides overnight, and why a misspelled capital city can spark a diplomatic incident. For writers and journalists, using an endonym signals care; for travelers, it signals that you've done the reading.

Here is a quick reference for the twenty names this article has examined:

Practically speaking: follow your outlet's or publisher's official style guide first, since many still codify exonyms for readability. When the guide is silent, default to the endonym. And when an exonym is genuinely the clearer choice — in a historical passage, or for readers who would not recognize the local form — gloss it once, then move on. Precision here costs a single clause and buys a great deal of goodwill.