We Should Call Countries By Their Actual Names

Buddy Book Club once again coming at you with a solution to solve world problems (check out our past ingenious ideas about a Metric Clock System and banning Time Zones).

This time we’re talking about country names. No, not the names we were taught in school but the endonymous country name (I have no idea if I used that right I just learned that ‘endonym’ was a word 5 seconds ago). Why were we ever taught variations of the actual countries name? It’s like we looked at a map and just Ellis Island’nd every name (although that looks like it was another myth taught to us in school as well).

We just decided Espana = Spain, Française = France, Italia = Italy. Why hasn’t this been corrected yet? Imagine if Spanish speakers come to America and insisted on calling it Esatdos Unidos. At least with the United States – ‘United’ and ‘States’ are actual real words, whereas Espana and Spain are both made up words, why not go with the one that the actual citizens and government of that nation call it? And I understand this is easier for countries that use the same alphabet as us, saying ‘China’ instead of the phonetic name Zhōngguó is easier.

But would this really be that hard had we learned it as a kid? I mean ‘Yugoslavia’ isn’t exactly the easiest country name to pronounce but we all know of Yugoslavia and it’s no longer even a country! If there are Yougoslavian freedom fighters reading this – I’m just joking, you’ll always be a country in the BBC’s eyes.

The other thing that doesn’t make sense is that we literally already have cities with French names, Spanish Names, German Names, and many more right here in the US of A.

Baton Rouge – French for Red Stick 

New Braunfels – German for Brownrock (people kinda sucked at naming back in the day huh?)

San Diego – Spanish for Whales Vagina 

Plenty of examples of these spread across the US but we never changed any of these to an English version of the name. We’re basically taught in school that actually that guy named José, he’s actually ‘Joe ‘here in the US so that’s what we’ll call him. No wonder other countries hate us, we show up to France, order some French Fries, ask if they sell bagged wine, proceed to black-out and then tell them they’re pronouncing their country name wrong (or was that just what I did in France?)

This is an easy fix that’ll help bring unity across the globe! So let’s fix those maps and turn them the proper way while we’re at it.