Seas in Different Languages: 17 Seas, Gulfs and Straits

Colours, neighbours and directions

Sea names are older and more local than ocean names. Most of them say one of three things: a colour, a people or country on the shore, or a direction seen from somewhere. The Black, Red, White and Yellow Seas carry colours; the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal and the Caspian carry neighbours; the North Sea and the German and Scandinavian Ostsee for the Baltic carry directions.

Colours translate easily, so the Black Sea is Mer Noire, Schwarzes Meer, Karadeniz, البحر الأسود (al-Baḥru l-Aswad) and 黑海 (Hēihǎi) with hardly a change in meaning. Neighbours and directions are where languages part company. A sea that one coast calls northern another may call western, and a gulf named after one shore can have a second name from the other.

Each table below lists one sea, gulf or strait. Languages that write the name identically share a row with their ISO 639 codes. Bosnian, Kazakh, Persian, Serbian, Tatar and Uzbek appear once per script they are written in; names in non-Latin scripts carry a letter-by-letter romanisation in the last column. Armenian, for example, writes the Caspian as Կասպից ծով (Kaspic̕ cov) and the Red Sea as Կարմիր ծով (Karmir cov), with ծով, cov, as the word for sea.

Several cells hold more than one name, separated by semicolons. Turkish shows the most: modern forms such as Akdeniz for the Mediterranean next to Ottoman ones such as Bahrisefit and Bahrimutavassıt.