Names of Georgia

The first mention of the name spelled as "Georgia" was recorded in Italian on the mappa mundi of Pietro Vesconte dated AD 1320.

The transformation of vrkān into gorğān and alteration of v into g was a phonetic phenomenon in the word formation of Proto-Aryan and ancient Iranian languages.

By the early 9th century, the meaning of "Kartli" was expanded to other areas of medieval Georgia held together by religion, culture, and language.

The idea of all-Georgian unity also dominated history-writing of the early 18th-century Georgian scholar and a member of the royal family, Prince Vakhushti, whose Description of the Kingdom of Georgia (agtsera sameposa sakartvelosa) had a noticeable influence on the latter-day conception of Sakartvelo.

Although Georgia was politically divided among competing kingdoms and principalities during Vakhushti's lifetime, the scholar viewed the past and present of these breakaway polities as parts of the history of a single nation.

[9] In other Kartvelian languages, like Mingrelian, Georgia is referred as საქორთუო sakortuo, in Laz it's ოქორთურა okortura, when in Svan it uses the same name as Georgian does, საქართველო sakartvelo.

[12] Another theory, popularized by the likes of Jean Chardin, semantically linked "Georgia" to Greek γεωργός ("tiller of the land").

The Russian name was brought into several Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian) as well as other languages historically in contact with the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union (such as Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Hungarian, Yiddish, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uyghur, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese).

[18] In August 2005, the Georgian ambassador to Israel Lasha Zhvania asked that the Hebrew speakers refer to his country as Georgia גאורגיה‎ and abandon the name Gruzia.

It coexisted with the names גאורגיה‎ (Gheorghia with two hard g's) and גורג'יה‎ (Gurjia), when Gruzia took over in the 1970s, probably due to a massive immigration of bilingual Georgian-Russian Jews to Israel at that time.

[24][25] Georgia had initially asked for a change in December 2009 to be called Georgija instead of Gruzija; the request was forwarded to the Commission of the Lithuanian Language and was declined at that time.

[28] As a gesture of appreciation, Georgia also changed Lithuania's Russian-derived name of Litva (Russian: Литва) to its native Lietuva.

[32] In June 2019, during the 2019 Georgian protests, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko called upon the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine to change Gruziya to Sakartvelo.