Croatia

The name Croatia comes to English through medieval Latin Croatia, which derives from the Latinized form of the South Slavic Hrvatska. The Croats called themselves Hrvati in their own language, and Byzantine sources around 950 AD, in Constantine VII's De Administrando Imperio, recorded the name as Chrobatoi. Medieval Latin documents from the twelfth century settled on Croatia for international use, and the form has not changed since.

Where Hrvati itself comes from is one of the more contested questions in Slavic etymology. The most striking theory, developed in the early twentieth century and refined since, traces the name to an Old Iranian root, perhaps Harahvati or Harvat, attested in ancient Persian sources as the name for a region near modern Herat in Afghanistan. If correct, this suggests the proto-Croat identity crystallized through contact with Iranian-speaking Sarmatian or Alan peoples on the Eurasian steppe before the Slavic southward migration.

The Avestan text Vendidad uses a form Haroiuua for that eastern region, and the Achaemenid inscription at Persepolis from around 519 BC lists Haraiva as a satrapy under Darius I. Whether these toponyms are connected to the tribal name that became Hrvati is not proven, but the phonological correspondence is close enough that many specialists take the Iranian hypothesis seriously. The alternative theory seeks a Slavic root, but no convincing candidate has emerged.

By the ninth century, when the Croatian kingdom took shape under Branimir and Tomislav, Hrvatska was firmly the self-name. The Latin Croatia entered European cartography by the sixteenth century and passed into English usage by the same path. Today Croats still say Hrvatska while the rest of the world uses a name that passed through two layers of linguistic translation, one Slavic and one Latin, from a possible origin on the other side of Asia.