By far one of the most difficult obstacles I’ve had to face while writing high and low fantasy is that it’s so hard to come up with names for kingdoms, tribes, clans, countries, etc. Personal names are easy, I could go on all day.
But names for countries are entirely different. I’m the type of person that wants their characters and the places they inhabit to have meaningful names. I think the Fire Emblem series has done a wonderful job in the past years on using meaningful names for their countries, and the series is why I’m so into etymology.
Also, a minor disclaimer: I am not talking about personal names for characters, but names for kingdoms and nations, so hopefully this won’t get confused with another thread.
A lot of early names were synonymous for “us” vs them. Start with a person from that tribe/realm and then picture them naming themselves to an outsider, rinse and repeat for each tribe you make.
Kingdoms were invariable named after the dynasties that began them… as were empires. Sometimes they kept the dominant tribal name as the kingdom or empire name.
It is very much like naming the individual character only more restrictive.
I will post a list of country names with meaning, I hope this help you.
-Altaria the high one
-Leon brave one
-kajin treacherous one
-Regalia royal one
-Alma the spiritual one
-Corada the clean one
-invierno the winter country
-Muralla the one with great walls
For the tribes I think is good something like two words I mean:
On that note, a lot of very early names for countries also took the dominant landscape feature (Plains, River, Hill Country, sorts of things) or from a prominent deity of the culture.
There are also a few different ways of looking at how foreign nations are named - @Zolataya’s system (which is fabulous) of using the actual tribal names for various countries is one. Then, there’s the common modern system of using vaguely-related linguistic constructs from your native speech of choice.
In English, for instance, there’s Wales instead of Cymru, Wales being a broadened latinisation of a Celtic tribal name.
And there’s Holland instead of het Nederlands - which, the history of the country’s name is unusually complex, even for countries, but it has traces of both the ‘people’ and ‘geography’ concepts depending on which word one is tracing.
And so forth!
The second method, taking the meanings and using the native language in question, is mostly what I’ve been using to rename all the countries mentioned in my current WiP. It’s fun because just translating across three or four languages can end up with really fascinating results.
@Zolataya give good suggestion there, and also try looking into the history of real countries to see where they came from. America, for instance, was named after a fellow who showed that, no, this is not India, but rather a whole New World - Amerigo Vespucci, or in Latin, Americus Vespucius.
Iceland’s name is rather uncertain, but it may have to do with the fact if you approach the island from the south-east you see a glacier before much anything else.
And so on. Quite fascinating, really, this subject.
It depends. What is your inspiration for the kingdoms?
What did you based them from? Germanic, English, Scottish, etcetera, etcetera…
Look at ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, the counties in the Arryn’s Vale has names like the Eyrie, Runestone, Gates of the Moon, Ninestars, etcera. They have these sort of celestial, misty and hidden theme to them.
They key is to have a theme and try to stay consistent.
Show me the map and tell me where you based kingdoms from, or your description for them and I could help you.
Go onto google maps, pick a place, and zoom in. Pick whatever small town name you want. I personally prefer the middle east, Turkey especially, just because of the huge blend of cultures.
@Sampl15’s advice is good, but I urge anyone who wants to follow it to find out the meaning of the names they find. I’m sure other nations have place names like these as well, and it would be embarrassing to use them.
Sorry for not replying to everyone on here, but you all have really great advice, I appreciate it! Does anyone have other good websites to use (aside from Behindthename) for really obscure names? I keep running into the same names on different websites with little or no variation.
@WulfyK Don’t forget about the Batman province in Turkey.
I guess I could give a few names of a game I played long ago. One of them has a lot of meaning for me and represents and is the name of guilds/teams/groups and the like in group communities and always my personal nation name in every game.
Yep, suffixes. Then there’s a last category of possibilities, the (Con)Federation the Empire the Hegemony (how could I forget the villains of Xor here) and the Republic, usually reserved for states so large, old and/or powerful that almost nobody uses the official long name for them anymore in regular conversation.
