Eritrea in other languages: Ertra, Asmara and the six regions (zobas)

Ertra, Eritrea, Eryṯraía: a Greek sea name in two scripts

Eritrea is one of the few countries that most of the world writes in one shape. The Latin form Eritrea stands unchanged in 44 languages, from English and Italian to Finnish and Hungarian; Slavic languages change only the ending, as in Eritreja or Эритрея (Ėritreja). Greek Ερυθραία (Eryṯraía) shows the source: the ancient Greek name of the Red Sea, built on ἐρυθρός (erythros), red, which Italy adopted for its colony in 1890.

Tigrinya and Amharic write the name ኤርትራ (Ertra) in the Ethiopic script, a syllabary in which each character stands for a consonant with its vowel. Arabic has no fixed spelling: the list gives six, among them إريتريا (Irītriyā), إرتريا (Iritriyā) and إرتيريا (Irtīriyā), and searchers type ارتريا and ارتيريا in the same way. The state itself uses إرتريا in its Arabic name.

Japanese writes エリトリア (Eritoria); Chinese 厄立特里亞 (Èlǐtèlíyà) and Korean 에리트레아 follow the European form. The capital Asmara has its own pairs of variants: Asmara beside Asmera in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, أسمرة beside أسمرا in Arabic.

Zoba Maʿəkäl to Zoba Gaš Barka: what the region names say

Four of the six names describe a position. Zoba Maʿəkäl is the central region around Asmara, Zoba Däbub the southern one, and the two coastal regions are the Northern and Southern Red Sea, ቀይሕ ባሕሪ (Ḳäyyəḥ Baḥri) in Tigrinya and البحر الأحمر (al-Baḥr al-Aḥmar) in Arabic.

ISO 3166-2 has carried the six regions since 2000, when they replaced the ten provinces of the first list, among them Hamasien, Seraye and Akele Guzai. The ISO codes follow the Tigrinya names: ER-MA for Maʿəkäl, ER-DU for Däbub, ER-SK for Sämenawi Ḳäyyəḥ Baḥri and ER-DK for Däbubawi Ḳäyyəḥ Baḥri.

Ertra, Ertra, Ertra: the national anthem

Ertra, Ertra, Ertra has been the national anthem of Eritrea since 1993. The Tigrinya words are by Solomon Tsehaye Beraki.