British country names explained

Why is England called England? The answer’s not as simple as you think. Where in the world was the original Scotland? Clue: it wasn’t there. And does the word Welsh really mean “slave”? Find out as we take an  etymological trip around Britain. It’s time for another RobWords. Hello. I am speaking English. But why? What I mean is, why is the language  that I’m speaking called English? Yes, because it comes from England. But that doesn’t actually answer the question. Why is England called England?

And that’s what we’re going to get into now. Well over the last millennium and a half,  England has been variously called England, Ingland, Angland, Ongland, Yngland and Ængland. You can basically stick any vowel at the  start and you get an old spelling of England. Except U. I couldn’t find an Ungland. But other genuine Old English  names included Ængleland, Englalond, Anglenelonde, Yngelond and Ingeland. “Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerlaand” Fun fact: England and its derivatives are the only exam

ples in Modern English of E-N-G  making an ing sound. Prove me wrong. But all these names for England boil down to the  same thing. They mean the land of the Angles. The Angles were the Germanic  tribe that popped over to the biggest of the British Isles in the 5th  century AD from the Anglian peninsula. That’s part of modern-day Germany and Denmark. The Roman Tacitus is thought to have been the first to write about them.  The called them the Anglii. But they didn’t come to Britain alone. A coup

le of other Germanic groups popped across  the North Sea at around the same time. One of them was the Saxons -  and that’s why we refer to the Germanic people living in Britain  at the time as the Anglo-Saxons. The Saxons had come from  what is now northern Germany. And a third Germanic group, the rather  mysterious Jutes, also joined them in Britain. They’re thought to have most likely come over  from the Jutland Peninsula in modern-day Denmark. But another theory is that they set off from  Fri

esland in what we now call the Netherlands. Anyway the collective name for these Germanic  invaders, the speakers of Old English, were the Anglo-Saxons because the Angles  and the Saxons were the bigger groups. So why does England and by  extension “English” end up being named after the Angles and not the Saxons? Well, probably because the Angles  really went all-in on their new home, shipping their royals over, and commanding  larger and more powerful kingdoms. Plus the Saxons still kind of had

  their own thing going on back home. To call England Saxonland would have been weird, given that there was another  Saxonland over In Saxony. So land of the Angles it is. And it’s remarkable how consistently it’s known as that. All of these names  just mean “land of the Angles”. How’s that for brand recognition. Pretty much everyone in the world agrees  that England is the land of the Angles. Except, that is, for its nearest neighbours. The Irish Gaelic name for England is… well hold on, I actu

ally got an Irish  friend, Arthur, to pronounce this one for me… [Arthur] Sasana [Rob] Yeah, and that means… Land of the Saxons. As does the Scots Gaelic word. Come on guys, I’ve just explained all this. Meanwhile in Wales, speakers of Welsh  - which is a different type of Celtic language to Irish - also prefer not to  call England the land of the Angles. They call it Lloegr, which was the medieval Welsh  name for a large chunk of what is now England. So the Welsh language word for England  is,

you know, pretty inoffensive. Unfortunately, the Anglo-Saxon  name for Wales was not. The story goes that the Old English  word for the Welsh meant “slave”. Well, slave or foreigner. Neither of which is terribly nice,  I’m willing to go on record as saying. However, I also want to go on record as saying,  it’s isn’t actually quite as simple as that. Yes, an Old English word for both  “foreigner” and “slave” was this, weahl, from which we get “Welsh”. It’s like “wealh-ish”. But a look at the word

’s relatives across other Germanic languages shines  a light on some important nuance. You’re going to enjoy that  when I go into it in a second. But that clearly quite unpleasant link  between the English name for Wales and enslavement remains something of a sore point. And there have actually been calls for  the name of Wales to be changed. In fact, just a few weeks ago, a petition was  started calling for Cymru - the Welsh language name - to be used in English as well. Now, whether or not you

think that is a  reasonable or ridiculous suggestion may very well depend on the news  source you read about it in. But if you used this video's sponsor,  Ground News, you got the whole story. Ground News is an app and website that  gathers news articles from around the world and allows you to compare  coverage to get the full picture. In the case of the Welsh name change story, you  can see how the language in the headlines varied. The National played it with a straight bat, simply reporting t

he numbers of  people who had signed the petition. Whereas Sky News stressed the name  Wales's link to the idea of foreignness, and Welsh feelings of being  oppressed by the English. Ground News is also fantastic for seeing how coverage of any story varies  across the political spectrum. It tells you a bias rating of each  source and how reliable an outlet is. Plus Ground News has a wonderful  Blindspot feature that shows you stories that only one side  of the argument is covering. Ground News i

s a brilliant tool for cutting  through the nonsense and getting to the truth. So go to ground.news/robwords to  get 40% off unlimited access on the Vantage subscription and  start getting the full story. So back to Wales and that Old English  word that gives us the word Welsh. Its equivalents in other Germanic  languages tell a fascinating story, because outside of Anglo-Saxon England the word  doesn’t mean slave or even, really, foreigner. Its equivalent in the ancestral  languages of German a

nd Dutch refer very specifically to  speakers of foreign languages. And actually, even more specifically than that, they refer to speakers of Romance  languages like Italian and French. That’s why the French speakers in Belgium  are to this day called the Walloons. Ooh, and probably my favourite  fact from this whole video… The word walnut is so called because it’s the nut we got from the speakers of  these weird Romance languages. It’s the nut we got from the Romans. Anyway, when the Angles, Sa

xons and  Jutes landed in the British isles, the Romans had already hopped it. But the Germanic tribes used the term  wealh to refer to speakers of a different, but equally incomprehensible, set of tongues: language of the Celts or the  Celtic Britons, as we call them. The Anglo-Saxons then proceeded  to enslave some of these native Celtic inhabitants, so Welsh came to mean slave. And the rest of the Celtic Britons  end up being forced to the Western fringes of Great Britain - an area that the 

Anglo-Saxons therefore refer to as Wales because it’s where all the Welsh were. But that Wales didn’t just encompass  modern day Wales, for example, it also included the southwestern tip of  modern-day England - an area called Cornwall. And the -wall at the end of Cornwall  comes from the same root as “Wales”. The Cornwealas were the Cornish  Welsh, the Britons of Cornwall. And there were other variants  too, such as the Norðwealas, the North Welsh, who were in modern-day Wales and even the Stra

thclyde Welsh, who could be found  in modern-day Scotland and northwestern England. Wealh is also related to  the Roman name for France, Gallia, and the Celts who lived there, the gauls. I’ve talked before about how Ws and Gs swap around  when Romance and Germanic speakers get together. It’s why we have guardian and warden, and  guarantee and warranty, William and guillaume. and that link between Welsh and gaul is  made all the clearer by the French name for Wales: Pays de Galles, which  is basi

cally land of the Gauls. Pays de Galles and Wales are what  we might call “exonyms” because they’re the names given to a country by  outsiders, by people who don’t live there although, obviously, most Welsh  people now do call it Wales too. The opposite of an exonym  is the name that the locals call a place and that’s referred to as an endonym. And I’ve already mentioned that the  Welsh language word for Wales is Cymru, which is thought to derive from a  Celtic word simply meaning “compatriot”.

So, effectively that’s the  opposite of foreigner, isn’t it? So where the English are calling them outsiders,  the Welsh are calling themselves “insiders”. I think that’s kind of neat. Moving on from Wales, where do you think so far as  the Anglo Saxons were concerned, the Scots lived? That’s right. In Ireland. It is true, the Roman name  for the inhabitants of the big island next door to Britain were the Scotus long before the Supreme Court  of the United States came along. The origins of that

post-classical  Latin term are uncertain, but one of the theories is that it’s from the  name of a mythical princess from the traditions of a Gaelic-speaking  peoples who originated in Scythia. That’s an awful long way away from Ireland, but it  is thought they may have somehow ended up there. It’s just a theory. Anyway, there are examples in Old English of  the word Scotland being used to mean Ireland. This quote uses the Latin name for  the island of Ireland, Hibernia, and clarifies it by sayi

ng  “which we call Scotland.” That’s cool, right? The people in modern day Scotland only  start being called Scots when the Irish Scots cross over to the bigger island  next door from the fifth century onwards. Then, modern day Scotland is  dominated by a group called the Picts, who got their name from the Latin word  pictī, which meant “painted people”, apparently because of their  tendency to decorate their skin. But Scotland doesn’t start being called  Scotland for a few more centuries. In th

e meantime, the areas where the Celtic  Scots and the Picts lived gets the name Alba, which is actually one of the official names of Scotland even today and comes with an  extremely confusing adjective form. Throughout all of this, by the  way, Ireland is called Ireland. Apart from the occasional  reference to it as Scotland, the Old English name for the  island to the west is Ireland a name based on the local Celtic name for it, Ériu. That in turn originates from the  name of a Celtic goddess o

f the same name. The modern Irish descendent of that word, Éire,  is used today to mean both the island and the state of Ireland, which excludes Northern  Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Actually, did you know that the  full name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? That’s what it says on the front of my passport. Great Britain is the big island with  England, Scotland and Wales on it. So where does the word Britain come from then? Well it’s from t

he Roman name  for the island, Britannia. Britannia in turn comes from the Ancient  Greek name for the British Isles, Pretannike, which the Greeks are believed to have  taken from the Celts who were living there. The theory goes they were calling themselves  something along the lines of Pretani, which is thought to have also meant “painted” or  “tattooed people”, like Picti did for the Romans. So what is so Great about  Great Britain? Good question. Well, it isn’t actually a boast. It  doesn’t m

ean “excellent Britain” even though our overcrowded trains and polluted  rivers really are world class these days. The great is likely just a reference  to the island’s size in relation to the other Britain: Brittany in northern France. It might surprise you to hear that  the local language in Brittany, Breton, is closer to Welsh than  it is to any other language. It’s a Brethonic Celtic language, just  like Welsh and Cornish. The people of Brittany share a huge amount of  Celtic heritage with t

he Welsh and the plot thickens yet further  when you consider that the Irish Gaelic name for Wales means “little Britain”. There’s one more term for Britain - the “great”  one - that I should mention and that is Albion. This is another name used by the Romans,  but whereas Britannia referenced the people, Albion is thought to have been more descriptive. There are two compelling theories  for where the word comes from. One is that it’s from the Latin for white, albus. Albus Dumbledore means White

  Bumblebee, so far as I can tell. Why would Britain be “white”? Well,  the first thing that greets you, if you approach it at the right angle, is  the white cliffs of England’s southern coast. The other theory is that Albion, like Britannia, ultimately comes from a local Celtic  word, this time meaning “world”. The world of the Celts. It’s also where that word Alba  meaning Scotland comes from and the modern Welsh and Irish words for Scotland too. Right, if you’ve made it this far into the vide

o, I reckon you can handle the really  geeky stuff that I’m about to get into. I just very quickly want to look at the rest  of the British Isles. Because you don’t just have Great Britain you’ve got all these  other little islands floating around it. Let’s start at the top and work our way down. So, Shetland’s name is of Scandinavian origin.  The Old Icelandic name for it was Hjaltland. But that sound at the start morphed into  a /sh/ sound in English, the same as the Yorkshire village of Shipt

on was  called Hypton under the Vikings. The Older Scots name for Shetland  was Ȝetland spelt with that fun letter yogh at the start - a letter  that is frequently misread as a Z. Hence, the name of Shetland is  sometimes recorded as Zetland. The Marquess of Zetland is  still an official title. The nearby islands of Orkney also  have a very old Scandinavian name. The Old Icelandic name for them was Orkneyjar and the Old English name was  basically Orkney as well. The earliest written reference t

o the  Hebrides is from the Roman, Pliny the Elder. He calls them the Hebudes  and it’s thought the word Hebrides might simply be a misreading of that. The Latin name may, like so many of  the names that we’ve come across, come from a Celtic name for the people there. The most satisfying theory about  that is that these people may have been called the Epidii, or “horse people”. Maybe Gulliver just took a wrong turn? The Isle of Man is unusual  in that apart from Ireland, it’s the only one of the

places we’ve looked  at that is not part of the United Kingdom. It’s one of the British Isles, but not part of  the UK. It has a rich Celtic history, having been settled by the Ancient Britons and the Celts  from Ireland, as well as the Vikings from Norway. Its parliament, the Tynwald is the “Oldest  Continuous Parliament in the World”. Also, Manx cats don’t have tails. Anyway, the name Isle of Man is  thought to come from the name of the Celtic sea god Manannán mac Lir,  who is said to have ru

led the island. The Isle of Man has its own language  closely related to Irish and in Manx Gaelic the island is Ellan Vannin or  Mannin, which means Manannan’s island. The English name for the Welsh  island of Anglesey is thought to be of Old Norse origin and has  nothing to do with the Angles. One of the theories is that it means Hook Island. Another is that it means Ongl’s island,  but no one actually knows who Ongl was. No one is quite sure why the Isles of Scilly are  called silly but the mo

st fun theory is that the Romans loved the salted fish they imported from  there so much they named the islands after them. So that would mean the name is a corruption of  the Latin for “salted ling”, a type of fish. The Channel Islands of Jersey and Guerney  are thought to be named after Vikings. They probably mean something like  Geirr's island and Grani’s island. And the isle of Wight was known to  the Romans as Vectis or Insula Vecta. Exactly why isn’t known, but it’s thought it  might well

come from a Welsh term meaning “work”. And with that, our work here is done. If you’ve enjoyed this, you should  watch this video next and also sign up to my free newsletter for more  wordy fun once a week at zero cost. Thanks.