Mexico in other languages: exonyms, Mexico City, states and the anthem

México, Mēxihco, Méjico: one name, two sounds

Mexico is the Nahuatl place name Mēxihco carried over into Spanish, a name usually linked with the Mexica, the people better known as the Aztecs. In the first Spanish spellings the letter x stood for a sh sound, which in Spanish itself soon turned into the guttural sound heard today. For a time the country was also written Méjico, the form the list still gives beside México for Spanish and Aragonese, but the Real Academia Española recommends México, and that is the spelling in use.

Abroad the name splits along those two sounds. English, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages keep Mexico, German and Czech write Mexiko, Polish Meksyk, Italian Messico. Russian has Мексика for the country but Мехико, with the guttural х, for the capital. Vietnamese lists both Mễ Tây Cơ and Mê-hi-cô, and Chinese writes 墨西哥, Mòxīgē.

Several languages spoken inside Mexico appear in the list. Yucatec Maya writes Méxikoo, Purepecha Mejiku, Totonac and Tzotzil Mejiko, Huichol Mekiku; Otomi uses a name of its own, M’onda.

From Distrito Federal to Ciudad de México

ISO 3166-2:MX codes 32 units with three letters each, from MX-AGU for Aguascalientes to MX-ZAC for Zacatecas. One code has changed. The Distrito Federal became Ciudad de México in a constitutional reform of January 2016, a federal entity beside the states, and ISO replaced MX-DIF with MX-CMX.

The capital itself has many names. Spanish says Ciudad de México, Nahuatl Āltepētl Mēxihco, the city of Mexico, and most European languages translate the phrase: Città del Messico, Cidade do México, Mexikóváros. German, Russian and French simply say Mexiko, Мехико and Mexico; in German that is the name of the country too.