This world map shows the names of countries as their inhabitants call them
A cultural minute for you:endonymy is when a name is regularly and commonly used by a population to refer to itself or the place where it lives in its own language (Source: Wikipedia).
A brilliant cartographer has reinvented the world map to reflect the names of countries as endonyms used by their inhabitants in the prevailing local language. An endonym refers to the name of a place used by the people who live there, and may differ from the names universally recorded on world maps from the database of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names.
For the « endonym card », the language that is most widely and currently adopted is used for the country name in cases where more than one national or official language is in use. For example, people living in Germany don’t call their country « Germany ». Instead, they use the German endonym « Deutschland ». The same goes for the United States, which is known locally as United States. This map shows the real name of the country in its official language.
The cartographer admits that what bothers him most is that places like South Africa and India have a dozen recognized languages, but there’s only room for one name on the map. You can find out more about this map at Endonymap.com (allowing you to see more. The photos below do not show all countries).
