List of country names in various languages

Last updated

Most countries of the world have different names in different languages. Some countries have also undergone name changes for political or other reasons. Countries are listed alphabetically by their most common name in English. Each English name is followed by its most common equivalents in other languages, listed in English alphabetical order (ignoring accents) by name and by language. Historical and/or alternative versions, where included, are noted as such. Foreign names that are the same as their English equivalents are also listed. See also: List of alternative country names

Please format entries as follows: for languages written in the Latin alphabet, write "Name (language)", for example, "Afeganistão (Portuguese)", and add it to the list according to English rules of alphabetical order. For languages written in other writing systems, write "Romanization - native script (language)", for example "Argentine - אַרגענטינע (Yiddish)", and alphabetize it in the list by the Romanized form.

Due to its size, this list has been split into four parts:

Limbu

See also

Related Research Articles

Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office filing systems, library catalogs, and reference books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latin alphabet</span> Alphabet used to write the Latin language

The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of additions and extensions, it forms the Latin script that is used to write many modern European languages, including English and many modern Asian languages, including Malay, Indonesian and Modern Standard Syloti (MSS). With modifications, it is also used for other alphabets, such as the Vietnamese alphabet. Its modern repertoire is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mojibake</span> Garbled text as a result of incorrect character encodings

Mojibake is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.

In computing, a locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, region and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language code and a country/region code. Locale is an important aspect of i18n.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Letter case</span> Uppercase or lowercase

Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese writing system</span> Structure of the Japanese writing system

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.

The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to applications. CLDR is written in the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latin script</span> Writing system based on the alphabet used by the Romans

The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, and technically Latin writing system, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.

An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code that is used to identify human languages on the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Best Current Practice (BCP) 47; the subtags are maintained by the IANA Language Subtag Registry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Latin script</span> Evolution of the Roman alphabet

The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.

The Klingon scripts are fictional alphabetic scripts used in the Star Trek movies and television shows to write the Klingon language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romanization of Persian</span> Representation of the Persian language with the Latin script

Romanization or Latinization of Persian is the representation of the Persian language with the Latin script. Several different romanization schemes exist, each with its own set of rules driven by its own set of ideological goals.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Writing system</span> Convention of symbols representing language

A writing system comprises a particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. Writing systems can generally be classified according to how symbols function according to these rules, with the most common types being alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes. Abjads generally only have letters for consonants, while pure alphabets have letters for both consonants and vowels. Abugidas use characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras. Logographies use characters that represent semantic units, such as words or morphemes.

The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. Unification was first achieved by a convention of the International Congress on Work for the Blind in 1878, where it was decided to replace the mutually incompatible national conventions of the time with the French values of the basic Latin alphabet, both for languages that use Latin-based alphabets and, through their Latin equivalents, for languages that use other scripts. However, the unification did not address letters beyond these 26, leaving French and German Braille partially incompatible and as braille spread to new languages with new needs, national conventions again became disparate. A second round of unification was undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO in 1951, setting the foundation for international braille usage today.