Exonym and endonym

An **exonym** is a name of a person, a people group, language, or place used by people of other places and languages. An **endonym** is a name that people of a certain place and language call themselves. For example, the endonym of Germany is _Deutschland_, because that is what Germans call their country.  Germans call themselves and their language _Deutsch_. Germany and German are its exonym because English speakers, who are not German, use those names to describe it.

This is actually very common across languages. One reason is because the sounds for an endonym may not exist in certain languages. It would be difficult for speakers of other languages to say them, so speakers of other languages make an exonym. Words in Japanese cannot end in any consonant that is not an "n" sound, and for that reason, _Deutsch_ is _Doitsu_ in Japanese. Japanese also adds Japanese morphemes so that there is no confusion between the country, the people, and the language. The German people are _Doitsujin_, in which _-jin_ means people, and the name of the German language is _Doitsugo_, in which _-go_ means language. While the country, people, and language of Laos can all be called _Lao_ in English, they are called _Raosu_, _Rasoujin_, and _Raosugo_ in Japanese.

Another reason why a country might call another country a different name is because people from a certain country might have different ideas about those people or associate them with certain things. For example, Greeks call their country _Hellas_, their country is known around the world as Greece because the Roman Empire named the region after _Magna_ _Graecia_, which were Greek  colonies in the early days of Rome. Germany has a very large number of exonyms. It is called _Allemagne_ in French, _Niemcy_ in Polish, and _Saksa_ in Finnish. This is because Germany has interacted with many other European countries.  The Dutch call themselves _Nederlanders_ in their own language, English speakers call them Dutch (a cognate of the German word _Deutsch_) because the words German and Dutch used to be interchangeable until Germany unified in the 1800s.

Even though in Mandarin Chinese China is called _Zhōngguó_, meaning the "Middle Kingdom" or the "Central States", most other countries call it China. It is believed that the word China came from the word _Qín_, in which the Qin dynasty unified China. In Japanese, it is called _Chūgoku_, which has the same meaning as the Chinese name, except it uses the Japanese pronunciation for the Chinese characters for the name 中國 / 中国. In Korean, it is called _Jungguk_ for the same reason. In Russian, China is called _Kitay_.

A third reason why a country might call another place a different name is because a language can borrow a name from another language. Even though Japan is called _Nippon_ or _Nihon_ in Japanese, the word passed on to Europe through many different languages, all of which were very different from Japanese. Marco Polo heard about Kublai Khan sending soldiers to Cipangu, which in Chinese characters is 日本, which means "Sun's Origin". When the Portuguese arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century, they were the first Europeans to directly trade with Japan, they called the country _Japão_ based on an old Malay word, which was borrowed from a southern Chinese dialect. Thus, most other countries call the country Japan. A few exceptions are Chinese, which call it _Rìběn_ based on the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters, and Korean, which call it _Ilbon_ based on the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters. Many countries call European cities by their endonym, including _Roma_, _Praha_, _Köln_, and _Napoli. T_he English names of many European cities are noticeably different. They are called Rome, Prague, Cologne, and Naples. These names were borrowed from French. Since French was the official language of England from the Norman invasion to King Henry V the cities names came into English through French.

For example, in the Italian language, it is now common for Italian speakers to refer to some African states as Mauritius and Seychelles rather than use the Italian exonyms _Maurizio_ and _Seicelle_.