Chad (Tchad) in French, Arabic and 95 languages: exonyms, 23 provinces

A country named after a lake

Chad takes its name from Lake Chad on its western border, and the lake in turn goes back to the Kanuri word for a lake. The French colonial administration wrote it Tchad, with the tch that French uses for the sound English spells ch. English kept the ch; German, Romansh and Luxembourgish needed tsch, Dutch and Afrikaans tsj, Polish cz, and the Slavic languages with a háček wrote Čad.

Arabic writes the same sound with two letters, t and š, so تشاد reads Tašād. Persian, Pashto and Urdu have their own letter for ch and spell the name چاد.

Some forms in the table drop the initial sound altogether: Somali Jaad, Sango Sâde and Vietnamese Sát. Latin uses the learned form Tzadia. Hausa has three spellings side by side: Cadi, Chadi and Tchad.

N'Djamena, the capital, carries an apostrophe in French between the initial N and the D. Languages without that convention resolve it differently: Czech, Latvian and Lithuanian write Ndžamena, Esperanto Niĝameno, and Arabic sources show at least four spellings, with and without a vowel before the n.

From 14 prefectures to 23 provinces

From independence in 1960 until 1999 Chad was divided into 14 prefectures, préfectures in French and muqāṭaʿa in Arabic. Regions replaced them in 2002. ISO recorded the new layout in 2007 with 18 regions, and in 2010 it split Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti, the vast northern prefecture, into Borkou, Ennedi and Tibesti while adding Bahr el Ghazal and Sila.

Ennedi was divided once more into Ennedi-Est and Ennedi-Ouest, which ISO added on 3 November 2014 while deleting the single code TD-EN. An ordinance of 10 August 2018 then reorganised the country into 23 provinces, 95 departments and 365 communes. The provinces kept the names of the former regions.

The Arabic names of the prefectures in the table below are spelled the way Chadian Arabic sources wrote them, with dotted letters for the hard g that standard Arabic script lacks, as in لوڨون الغربي for Logone Occidental, ڤرا for Guéra and مونڤو for Mongo. ISO 3166-2 publishes no Arabic script, only a romanisation, and writes the same sounds with q or gh: Qīrā, Lūghūn.

Flag of Chad

The flag is a vertical tricolour of indigo, yellow and red in the proportion 2:3, adopted on 6 November 1959, the year before independence. It is almost identical to the flag of Romania; since the 1990s that likeness has been discussed internationally, and the shades used for Chadian flags vary more than the colours Romania specifies.

The presidential standard uses the same three bands with the national coat of arms in the centre.