Country Index: Countries of the World A to Z in Their Own Languages

How the country index is arranged

Every row of the country index has four parts. The English short name opens the row and links to the country page, where the official long names, capitals, language data and the history of the name are set out. Under it sits the local name, the form a citizen would write on an envelope, in Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ge'ez or whatever the country writes in. Then follows the two-letter ISO 3166-1 code,¹ and where the country's provinces, regions or states have their own page, a link to that list of subdivisions.

Many rows carry no local name. That is not a gap: Canada, Kenya or Jamaica write their name the same way in English, and for countries such as Ghana, Zambia or Papua New Guinea English is the official language. A local name appears only where it differs from the English one.

The entries are sorted by the English name and split into six groups, A to B, C to F, G to K, L to N, O to S and T to Z. The list in the margin jumps straight to each group.

Country names and codes that changed

A country index has to follow the map. Since the turn of the century one state has dissolved, two have been added, and four have changed the English name the United Nations and ISO use for them.² The rows concerned carry a short note; the full story is on each country page.

Serbia and Montenegro, 2006

The state union of Serbia and Montenegro (ISO code CS) ended when Montenegro voted for independence in May 2006. Serbia took the code RS and Montenegro ME. The old row stays in the index because the name still turns up in maps, treaties and sports results of 1992 to 2006.

South Sudan, 2011

South Sudan became independent from Sudan on 9 July 2011 and received the code SS. Sudan kept its name and its code SD.

Renamed countries

Cape Verde asked to be called Cabo Verde in all languages in 2013. Czechia was registered as the short name of the Czech Republic in 2016; the long name did not change. Swaziland became Eswatini in 2018, Macedonia became North Macedonia in 2019 under the Prespa Agreement with Greece, and Turkey asked to be called Türkiye in 2022. In each case the local name in the second line is the one the country uses today.

Entries outside ISO 3166-1 membership

Kosovo has a page but no ISO country code; XK is a user-assigned code that the European Union and many data providers use. Palestine appears in ISO 3166-1 as Palestine, State of (PS), Taiwan as TW, the Vatican as VA and Western Sahara as EH.

Reading the local names

Almost one country in three writes its own name in a script other than Latin. Arabic script carries the largest group, from Morocco (المغرب, al-Maghrib) to Oman; Pakistan uses the same letters for Urdu, Iran and Afghanistan for Persian and Pashto. Arabic-script names run from right to left and are set that way in the tables.

Several countries show more than one local name because they have more than one official language. Belgium writes België, Belgique and Belgien; Switzerland adds Svizzera and the Romansh Svizra to Schweiz and Suisse; Singapore's four forms cover English, Chinese (新加坡), Malay (Singapura) and Tamil (சிங்கப்பூர்). Cyprus shows Greek and Turkish, Israel Hebrew and Arabic, Sri Lanka Sinhala and Tamil.

Some scripts in the index serve a single country: Ge'ez letters for Ethiopia (ኢትዮጵያ) and Eritrea, Thaana for the Maldives, the Tibetan script for Bhutan's Dzongkha (འབྲུག་ཡུལ, Druk Yul), Khmer for Cambodia and Lao for Laos. The alphabets behind them are laid out letter by letter on the alphabet pages.

Why some ISO codes follow the local name

Most two-letter codes are easy to read from the English name, but a few come from the country's own language, which is where the index's second line helps. DE is Germany because the code was taken from Deutschland, ES is Spain from España, HR is Croatia from Hrvatska and CH is Switzerland from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica. ZA, South Africa, comes from the Dutch Zuid-Afrika.

The codes are the same ones used for internet country domains, with one well-known difference: the United Kingdom has the ISO code GB but uses .uk on the internet.