Tired of having the country’s name butchered into Czecho or Czechland, the Czech Republic seeks a more concise name to end the confusion for English speakers.
The Czech leadership has a suggestion: Just call us Czechia.
“Our hope is that this step will overcome the problems we face with distorting the name and that the correct terms will dissolve into general knowledge,” according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry press department.
It used to be part of Czechoslovakia, before the country split in 1993 from what is now Slovakia. But that older name still gets bandied about. And the country’s name also gets confused with Chechnya, a small republic within the Russian Federation.
Czech Republic seeks a formal change in the United Nations database of country names. Nations can be called by their formal name, for example, the Commonwealth of Australia, and their shorter name, for example, Australia. Czech Republic wants to amend its shorter name in the U.N. databases from Czech to Czechia.
