NGM Blog Central - Czech It Out - National Geographic Magazine

Do you know where Czechia is? It’s not a fictional place—devised perhaps by Franz Kafka, although its capital is Kafka’s birthplace, Prague. That’s right, it’s the Czech Republic. If you read National Geographic very closely, you’ll find that the masthead lists Czechia as one of our 27 foreign-language editions. How did we get from Czech Republic to Czechia?

In short, it’s for convenience’ sake. As a one-word name for Czech Republic, Czechia is used by some people, just as America or the States are used as shortened names for United States of America. After Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce” in 1993, the newly formed Czech Republic sought a one-word name that could be used. That same year, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved Czechia, or Česko, literally Czechland in the Czech language. Public acceptance of that ruling remained elusive, however.

When the Czech local-language edition of National Geographic was launched in 2002, Editor Tomáš Tureček noted that “we still have not come up with a shorter name for our country, and that’s a hot topic for Czechs. The problem is that 50 percent of the population likes the word, but the rest don’t. So instead of National Geographic Česko, the edition’s name will be National Geographic Česka Republika.” By 2005, though, Česko had caught on well enough that Turecek, a strong Czechia advocate, changed the edition’s name to Czechia. Last year the Czech Geographical Society also endorsed Czechia. “According to experts,” Tureček says, “the name Czechia is the only one correct version of our shortened country name” in English.

Does that imply there are other short names? Apparently so. Some use “Czech” as a short name for the country, as in “I was in Czech last week.” (Similarly, Dominican is used as a short name for the Dominican Republic.) Czech as a country name sounds odd to me, but so does Czechia, and neither are widely accepted short names in English. Although Czechia appears on our masthead, we probably won’t use it within the magazine any time soon. But just as language evolves, so too do place-names. Although this may be the first time you’ve heard of Czechia, I’m pretty certain it won’t be the last.

—David Brindley

Posted by Lesley Rogers | Comments (0)
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