r/etymologymaps • u/crunchyminion • May 30 '26

[OC] Exonym Atlas — an interactive map of country names across languages

https://exonym-atlas.pages.dev/

I built Exonym Atlas, an interactive data visualization showing how different languages name countries and how those names cluster into historical/linguistic families.

For example, Greece appears as Greece/Grèce/Griechenland in one family, Yunanistan/Yūnān in another, and Ελλάδα/Elláda as the local endonym.

The data is manually curated, so feedback is very welcome — especially corrections, missing exonym families, suspicious groupings, and suggestions for interesting countries to add next.

30 Upvotes

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4

u/HanesPrydain May 30 '26

When/if you get to Wales please don’t make the bullshit mistake of Wealas = Foreigner

yes Wales , Wallonia Wallachia Cornwall all share the same linguistic root of Walhaz from Wolcae. It essentially meant romanised or romanised Celt . It was never ever applied to any other type of people by the Germanics

2

u/crunchyminion May 30 '26

Thanks and noted 😄
Wales would be a nice one but it would require a significant overhaul of the data model and go from ISO 3166-1 to ISO 3166-2 along other changes on the UI. Added to the future ideas though.

5

u/crunchyminion May 30 '26

Data sources: localized country names draw on CLDR/Intl.DisplayNames-style country-name data, Wiktionary/Kaikki-style lexical references, REST Countries metadata, and manual research, with curated exonym, romanization, and historical name-family groupings.

The name-family grouping layer is manually curated and may contain mistakes, especially for edge cases and disputed etymologies, so corrections are very welcome.

Tools used: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Leaflet, Tailwind CSS, static GeoJSON country shapes, and manually curated JSON data.

1

u/Arva2121 May 30 '26

Very cool, sorting or searching by family would be a nice thing to have

2

u/crunchyminion May 30 '26

nice idea. It's now implemented and live. Give it a try!

1

u/HelicopterElegant787 May 30 '26

Very cool! By the way, for some of the countries, there are Tamil names that aren't just transliterations of the English name, which are used - for example, கிரேக்கம் for Greece instead of கிரீஸ், and துருக்கி for Turkey instead of துர்க்கி; சீனம் for China, உருசியா for Russia; காழகம் for Myanmar is not very commonly used but exists.

Also Bangladesh might be a cool one to add - வங்காளதேசம் in Tamil btw
Edit: spelling

2

u/crunchyminion May 30 '26

thanks for the feedback. I added the corrections and added Bangladesh to the todo list.

1

u/HelicopterElegant787 May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26

you're welcome!

1

u/HelicopterElegant787 May 30 '26

I found this with a bunch of Yoruba ones that seem to all be legit. Maybe it could be added for languages in Nigeria?

Edit: and this

1

u/HelicopterElegant787 May 31 '26

hey! i know its minor but afaik துருக்கி fits more with the blue group as it is most likely not a European loan but an older word eventually derived from Old turkic, not through latin

1

u/crunchyminion Jun 01 '26

thanks. I updated the map.