An Exonym (Finland) and Endonym (Suomi) on a tourist T-shirt
by Hans Pul
For building and maintaining brands, uniformity in communication is crucial and confusion needs to be avoided. However, many places have different names in different languages. München is Munich in English, London is Londra in Italian, while Mailand is German for Milano. More extremely, some place names look and sound completely different in other languages, some of the most prominent examples being Suomi* (Finland), Hellas (Greece) and Nippon (Japan). In short, there are more exonyms (foreign language names for geographical features) than places out there. How does this affect place branding efforts abroad?
