Name of The Czech Republic - English Name

English Name

The traditional name of the country in English is Bohemia. It comes from the Celtic tribe of Boii which inhabited the area from the 4th century BC. The original Latin name Boiohaemum comes from Germanic Boi-heim meaning "home of the Boii." The name survived all the following migrations affecting the area including the arrival of the Slavic tribes and creation of the Czech state. The country was then known officially as the Duchy, and later Kingdom, of Bohemia and from the 14th century as the Crown of Bohemia. The major change came in 1918 when the Austro-Hungarian monarchy disintegrated, the king of Bohemia was deposed and the new Republic of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed, despite the original proposals for using the traditional name of Bohemia for the new state. The new name reflected the union of Czech and Slovak people and contained for the first time in history the English variant "Czech", which was until then employed only to denote ethnic or Czech-speaking Bohemians. The Czech people and their language were for centuries called "Bohemian" in English. Only during the rise of nationalism in the 19th century did the derivative of the Czech endonym (using Polish spelling identical with the antiquated Czech) appear in English to distinguish between Czech- and German-speaking ethnicities living in the country.

With the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 the question of the new short-form name appeared since the word "Czech" had been used only as an adjective or the name of the people and language but not the country itself. Despite the initial promotion by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the name "Czechia" this has never been adopted by the Czech and foreign authorities or the general public and remains as of 2012 only rarely used – with some exceptions in scholar circles. As "Czechia" remains uncommon, and the long form is unwieldy, uneducated people often resort to the adjective "Czech" (this is similar to "Dominican" used for the Dominican Republic and "Saudi" for Saudi Arabia).