Name "Česko"/"Czechia" to be entered in UN databases
23.05.2016 / 18:50 | Aktualizováno: 30.05.2016 / 18:53
The name “Czechia” will not replace the full official name of the Czech Republic. It is simply the English version of the country’s short name (”Česko”) and as such it will be entered in the UN databases of country names. In fact, “Česko” has officially been the Czech Republic’s short name since 1993. It is part of a national standard established in that year by the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre and approved (from the linguistic perspective) by the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
The full country name “Czech Republic” (“Česká republika”) will remain the country’s official political name. “Czechia” will be used only as the English version of the short country name “Česko”. It is up to each entity to decide whether to use the short version (“Česko/Czechia”) or long version (“Česká republika/Czech Republic”).
In some languages the Czech Republic’s short name is already well established e.g. in French - la Tchéquie, Spanish - Chequia, German - Tschechien.
The formation of the name “Czechia”
“Czechia” is grammatically correct and approved by the Czech Language Institute. Historically, the name first appeared in a Latin text in 1602. Its use in English texts dates back to 1841 and 1856; in 1866 it was first used in Australian newspapers. Between 1918 and 1960 it commonly appeared in US press as an expression referring to the western part of Czechoslovakia – which actually is “Česko/Czechia” in the current sense of this word.
Czechia” is a standard Latin-derived word. The Latin suffix –ia appears quite often in English country names (e.g. Austria, Australia, Croatia, Virginia, California, Indonesia, Slovakia, Latvia, Colombia). As a matter of fact, it appears in the names of the historical “lands” – geographic entities forming the present-day Czech Republic: Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. “Czechia” may sound unfamiliar at first, but so certainly did many other geographic names of non-English origin that are now in common usage (Idaho, Utah, Massachusetts, Lithuania, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Croatia, etc.).
Why are names such as “Czech”, “Czechlands” and “Bohemia” all wrong?
The Czech Language Institute has identified several English variants of the short name for the Czech Republic: Czech, Czechland/Czechlands, Czechia. The first one is unacceptable for this purpose because it is already in common use as a demonym, the name of the Czech language, and an adjective. “Czechland” and “Czechlands” are correctly formed in linguistic terms; nevertheless they are ad hoc neologisms that might be understood as pointing back to the name of a historical composite state - Czech Lands. “Bohemia”, in turn, refers to only one of the historical “lands” forming the present-day Czech Republic and, unlike “Czechia”, does not include the remaining historical “lands” - Moravia and Silesia.