Tue 25 Oct 2016
Yet, six months after
the shorter and supposedly punchier name of Czechia was officially adopted by the country’s leaders, citizens of the central European country of 10 million people seem in little doubt over what it should be called.
“The Czech Republic,” answered one person after another on being asked to name their country, some greeting the question with disbelieving stares.
“It’s a little confusing. Nobody calls it Czechia, I don’t know why,” said Lukas Hasik, 40, a software engineer hurrying through Wenceslas Square to an appearance by the Dalai Lama, who was visiting Prague. “People are used to the name Czech Republic by now and I would say we should stick with it.”
“It’s the Czech Republic,” agreed Zdenek Cech, 30, a medical student at Charles University in Prague. “I would like a shorter name but Czechia doesn’t sound nice. It sounds too small, or like some dialect.”
In April, Czech leaders, most prominently the president, Milos Zeman, who was the idea’s leading champion,
announced that Czechia would supplant Czech Republic as the country’s everyday common moniker - in the same way most other nations are known by names that omit their official constitutional status.
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The trouble is, Czechia is not catching on. Czech authorities continue to use the term Czech Republic on official correspondence and English-language websites, including Zeman’s presidential site.
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Disagreements over what to call the nation date back at least to 1992, when
the former Czechoslovakia divided in a so-called velvet divorce to form two independent states, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
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The name Bohemia was rejected because it explicitly excluded Moravia and Czech Silesia in the east of the country. Czechia was initially rejected for similar reasons, since it was derived from the name of the sixth-century Slavonic tribe that had settled Bohemia and was later adopted as the alternative Latin name for the province. Some also said it was too ugly, or that it sounded like the Russian republic of
Chechnya.
Now it is back, angering some who think it misrepresents the country’s image and earning the mockery of others, who dismiss it as a joke.
“I like the name Czech Republic because it sounds non-racial,” said Jana Stejskalova, an obstetrician gynaecologist originally from
Moravia. “Czechia sounds too eastern. It’s not a good sound for a western country.”
Eliska Cmejrkova, a Czech language teacher to Prague’s large foreign expatriate community, said calling the country Czechia could be justified historically but would be unlikely to stick.
“Czechia makes some sense historically but the common people will call it the Czech Republic,” she said. “You cannot
change a language by law; it’s like a living organism. Only linguists and nationalists care about this. When I talk about Czechia with my friends, we make fun of it and never use it.”
'Nobody calls it Czechia': Czech Republic's new name fails to catch on
