Names
The official name of the autonomous community, in Valencian Comunitat Valenciana, has seen a variety of renditions in English; including "Valencian Community", "Valencian Country", "Land of Valencia", "Region of Valencia" or most commonly, simply "Valencia". The Spanish name, Comunidad Valenciana, was co-official under the first Statute of Autonomy of 1982. At the present moment, the Valencian Government translates the name as "Region of Valencia" and, sometimes, "Land of Valencia", as the Department of Tourism states in publications edited both in Spanish and English.
Although Comunitat Valenciana, out of official consideration, is the most widely used name and the one that has become officially enshrined, there were two competing names at the time of the forging of the Valencian Statute of Autonomy. On the one hand País Valencià (País Valenciano in Spanish), was first reported in the 18th century, but its usage only became noticeable from the 1960s onwards, with a left-wing or Valencian nationalist subtext which began with the Spanish Transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It can be translated as "Valencian Country", or "Region of Valencia". An example of this use is the so-called Consell pre-autonòmic del País Valencià, the forerunner of the modern Generalitat Valenciana in 1978, and it is also referred to in the preamble of the Statute of Autonomy.
In order to solve the gap between the two competing names—the traditional Regne de València and the contemporary País Valencià—a compromise neologism, Comunitat Valenciana, was created ("Comunitat or Community" such as in Autonomous Community, which is the official name of the Spanish regions constituted as political autonomous entities).
In any case, the generic name of "Valencia" in English could refer to the city of Valencia, the Valencia province or the autonomous community.
Read more about this topic: Valencian Community
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
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—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“Without infringing on the liberty we so much boast, might we not ask our professional Mayor to call upon the smokers, have them register their names in each ward, and then appoint certain thoroughfares in the city for their use, that those who feel no need of this envelopment of curling vapor, to insure protection may be relieved from a nuisance as disgusting to the olfactories as it is prejudicial to the lungs.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)