Malawi in other languages: exonyms, Lilongwe, regions and districts

Malaŵi, Malawi, Malavi: one name, three spellings

The ŵ in Malaŵi is a Chewa letter. It stands for a closely lip-rounded w, a sound now rarely heard and often replaced by a plain w (Wikipedia, Chewa language, after Atkins 1950 and Kishindo 2001). The spelling with the circumflex is the one Chewa uses for the country, Dziko la Malaŵi, and for the adjective, la Malaŵi. English drops the mark and writes Malawi, the form that most languages in the list have taken over unchanged.

Where a language has no w, the name usually turns into Malavi, as in Croatian, Slovenian, Turkish and Albanian, or Malaui in Galician and Asturian. Portuguese lists five spellings side by side. Irish adds the article, An Mhaláiv; Latin makes it Malavium and Esperanto Malavio. In Cyrillic the shared form is Малави, with Малаві in Ukrainian and Rusyn, while Arabic writes مالاوي and Hebrew offers three spellings.

The capital Lilongwe changes even less. Most languages copy it letter for letter. Portuguese writes Lilongue, Spanish and Occitan Lilongüe, and Cyrillic Лилонгве.

From 24 to 28 districts

ISO 3166-2 had 24 districts for Malawi when it first appeared in 1998. Balaka, Likoma and Phalombe were added in 2002, Neno in 2010, which gives the 28 of today. Today the standard also lists the three regions above the districts, with their Chewa names: Chakumpoto for the north, Chapakati for the centre and Chakumwera for the south.

Every district is named after its district town, so the code list doubles as a list of seats. The capitals of the Northern and Southern regions are Mzuzu and Blantyre; Lilongwe is both the capital of the country and the seat of the Central Region.