Chile in other languages: exonyms, Santiago, Easter Island, regions

The sound of ch in other alphabets

The Spanish spelling Chile is shared by English, German, Portuguese, Polish and about thirty other languages, but its first sound is spelled in as many ways as there are orthographies. Esperanto writes Ĉilio, Basque Txile, Estonian Tšiili, Latvian Čīle, Maltese Ċili, Tagalog Tsile and Walloon Tchili. Each spelling records the same consonant with the tools of its own alphabet.

Some languages hear a different sound. Faroese and Albanian write Kili, West Frisian Sily, Malagasy Silia, Tongan Saile and Somali Jili. Greek has Χιλή (Ȟilī́), and Laz writes შილი (Šili) in Georgian letters.

In Cyrillic the dominant form is Чили (Čili), shared by twenty languages from Russian and Bulgarian to Kalmyk and Yakut, while Macedonian and Serbian keep the Spanish e: Чиле. Arabic has two spellings, تشيلي (Tišīlī) and شيلي (Šīlī), and Hebrew two as well, צ׳ילה and צ׳ילי.

East Asia shortens or reshapes the word. Japanese writes チリ (Chiri), Korean 칠레 (Chillae) and Chinese 智利 (Zhìlì), the same characters that Cantonese reads Jileih. Caucasus Kurdish is the one language in the list to add the suffix -stan, Ç’îlîstan, beside the plain Ç’îlî.

Easter Island: a translated name and a native one

Easter Island has two kinds of name. Rapa Nui is the name in Rapanui, and Quechua writes it as Rapanuy beside Paskwa wat’a. Almost every other language translates the European name word for word, island of Easter: Isla de Pascua in Spanish, Osterinsel in German, Île de Pâques in French, Остров Пасхи (Ostrov Pasȟi) in Russian and 复活节岛 (Fùhuó Jié dǎo) in Chinese.

The word for Easter carries the history of each language. Most Romance languages and many others use forms related to Latin Pascha: Isola di Pasqua, Ilha de Páscoa, Venetian Ìxoła de Pasqua, Swahili Kisiwa cha Pasaka and Turkish Paskalya Adası. Slavic languages use their own words for the feast, Velikonoční ostrov in Czech, Wyspa Wielkanocna in Polish and Великденски остров in Bulgarian, and Estonian has Lihavõttesaar.

Languages of South Asia take the English word instead. Hindi and Marathi write ईस्टर द्वीप (Īsṭar dvīp), Gujarati ઈસ્ટર ટાપુ and Urdu جزیرہٴ ایسٹر, each with a native word for island. Persian has both forms, the English loan in جزیرهٔ ایستر and a translation in جزیرهٔ پاک.

From 13 numbered regions to 16 named ones

The regions were once known by Roman numerals, assigned from north to south, with Santiago as the Región Metropolitana outside the count. New regions broke that order: Arica y Parinacota in the far north and Los Ríos in the south were both created by law in December 2006, began work in October 2007 and entered ISO 3166-2 in 2010.

Ñuble followed in 2018. Law 21.033 of 2017 turned Ñuble Province of Biobío into a region of its own with Chillán as capital, and ISO added CL-NB on 26 November 2018. That year Law 21.074 also dropped the numerals, so regions are now known by name alone.

Several names honour people. The Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins region is usually shortened to O’Higgins, and Aisén carries the name of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. ISO itself lists Aisén and Aysén as variants of the same region.