Niger

The Niger River is the third-longest in Africa, rising in the highlands of Guinea and tracing a great northeastward arc toward the Sahara before turning southeast to its delta in present-day Nigeria. Its name appears in medieval Arabic geography as "Nil al-Sudan" (the Nile of the Sudan) and in Portuguese maps of the late fifteenth century as "Rio Niger." The English form came through French, which had it from Portuguese cartography. The river, in other words, carried multiple names at once for centuries.

The root is Tuareg. The Tuareg people of the Sahara, who traded across the river's great bend for centuries, used forms like "n-eghirren" to describe flowing water or a great river. These forms were worn down through Arabic transcription and Portuguese abbreviation into the four-letter "Niger" that appears on European maps by 1500. The coincidence with the Latin adjective "niger" (black) led European writers to claim the river was named for dark water or dark peoples; that etymology is a false trail.

The Republic of Niger, landlocked in the Sahel, took the river's name when France established a colonial territory there in the 1890s. "Territoire du Niger" became autonomous in 1922 and an independent republic on August 3, 1960. Only a portion of the river actually runs through Niger; the river passes through nine countries in total. The country took the river's name because the river had defined the region's geography for every outsider who had ever written about it.

The name creates a linguistic difficulty that has never been cleanly resolved: in standard English, the pronunciation of "Niger" overlaps with a racial slur of entirely different origin. The Republic of Niger and international organizations use the French pronunciation to avoid this. Citizens of Niger are called "Nigeriens" to distinguish them from Nigerians, citizens of neighboring Nigeria, a country also named for the same river. Two nations, one river, and a spelling difference of four letters.