Brazil in other languages: exonyms, capital cities and the 26 states

From Terra de Santa Cruz to Brasil

Brazil takes its name from a tree. The brazilwood, pau-brasil in Portuguese, yields a deep red dye, and its name comes from brasa, ember. When Pedro Álvares Cabral reached the coast in 1500 he called it Ilha de Vera Cruz, the island of the True Cross; Lisbon soon turned that into Terra de Santa Cruz. While a Lisbon consortium held the dyewood lease, from 1502 to 1512, the trade name Terra do Brasil began to replace the pious one, to the later regret of the chroniclers João de Barros and Damião de Góis.

Most languages copy the Portuguese form and differ only in whether they write s or z. Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Indonesian keep Brasil; English, Croatian and Hausa have Brazil; German and Swedish write Brasilien, Italian Brasile and French Brésil. The Slavic languages build a noun in -ija: Russian Бразилия, Polish Brazylia, while Macedonian keeps a bare Бразил. Guarani says Vrasil and Aymara Wrasil.

Asian scripts follow the sound, not the spelling. Japanese writes ブラジル, Burajiru, Korean 브라질, Thai บราซิล and Hindi ब्राज़ील. Chinese uses 巴西, Bāxī, two characters chosen for their sound, and Vietnamese has both the Sino-Vietnamese Ba Tây and the phonetic Bra-xin.

Three capitals and their names

Brasília has been the capital since its inauguration on 21 April 1960. Salvador held the role until 1763 and Rio de Janeiro after that. The old capital also has the richest set of learned names: Latin gives Urbs Fluminensis and Flumen Ianuarii, River of January, and Katharevousa Greek Ρίον Ἰανέϊρον. São Paulo turns into San Paolo in Italian, Сан-Паулу in Russian and 聖保羅, Shèng Bǎoluó, in Chinese.

The map of the states settled only in 1988. When the capital moved, the old Federal District around Rio became the state of Guanabara, which merged into Rio de Janeiro state in 1975. Rondônia, once the territory of Guaporé, became a state in 1981; Roraima, the former Rio Branco territory, followed in 1988, and the territory of Fernando de Noronha went back to Pernambuco the same year. Since then the 27 units and their codes have stayed as they are, and the changes have come in the municipalities below them.