Eleven sovereign countries begin with the letter G: Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Guyana. Four of those names are variations on the same two words, which makes G the most internally confusing letter on the map.
Untangling Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana and New Guinea
Five places on Earth carry a version of this name, three of them G countries, and they are on three different continents. Here is what each one is:
- Guinea — a West African republic of about 246,000 km² and roughly 14 million people, capital Conakry, formerly French Guinea. Sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from the others.
- Guinea-Bissau — a much smaller West African state, about 36,100 km², capital Bissau, formerly Portuguese Guinea. It appended its capital's name at independence in 1974 precisely to avoid confusion with its neighbour.
- Equatorial Guinea — in Central Africa, on the Gulf of Guinea, about 28,000 km², capital Malabo, formerly Spanish Guinea. Files under E, not G.
- Guyana — in South America, on the Atlantic coast between Venezuela and Suriname, about 215,000 km², capital Georgetown, formerly British Guiana. English-speaking, and the only Commonwealth country on the South American mainland.
- Papua New Guinea — in Oceania, sharing the island of New Guinea with Indonesia. Files under P.
The common thread is that European mariners applied the name Guinea to the West African coast from the fifteenth century, then reused it for anywhere that reminded them of it. Guyana comes from an indigenous Amerindian word usually glossed as land of many waters, and is a separate etymology that European usage assimilated to the African one. New Guinea was named by a Spanish explorer who thought its people resembled those of the African Guinea coast.
So four different colonial powers each ended up with a Guinea, and each colony kept the name at independence with a qualifier attached. Our Guinea-Bissau guide covers the smallest of the West African pair.
Africa supplies six of the eleven
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence, in 1957, and it chose a name with no connection to its own territory: the medieval Ghana Empire lay far to the north-west, in what is now Mali and Mauritania. The name was adopted as a deliberate statement of African historical continuity, replacing the Gold Coast. About 239,000 km², roughly 34 million people, and home to Lake Volta, one of the largest reservoirs in the world by surface area.
Gabon straddles the equator on the Atlantic coast, is about 268,000 km², and has a population of only around 2.5 million — one of the lowest population densities in Africa. Roughly 85 per cent of it is forested, and it has set aside an unusually large share of its territory as national parks. Oil has given it a relatively high income per head for the region.
The Gambia is the smallest country on mainland Africa at about 11,300 km², and its shape is unique: a narrow strip a few dozen kilometres wide following the Gambia River inland for some 480 km, surrounded on three sides by Senegal. The border was drawn to match the reach of British gunboats up the river, and it produces the odd situation of a country you can cross by land in under an hour at most points. It is the only country whose official name begins with a definite article as standard usage.
Guinea holds the headwaters of three major West African rivers — the Niger, the Senegal and the Gambia — which has earned it the description of West Africa's water tower. It also holds among the largest bauxite reserves in the world.
Guinea-Bissau includes the Bijagós Archipelago, a group of some eighty islands designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and is among the world's poorest countries by income per head.
Germany and Greece: the two European entries
Germany is the most populous country in the European Union at roughly 84 million, with an area of about 357,000 km² and nine land neighbours — more than any other country in Europe. It runs from the North Sea and Baltic coasts, across the North German Plain, up through the central uplands to the Alps on the Austrian border, where the Zugspitze reaches about 2,962 metres. Its federal structure of sixteen states is a direct legacy of a territory that was hundreds of separate polities until 1871 and two separate countries from 1949 to 1990.
Greece has about 132,000 km² of land but an extraordinary amount of coast — well over 13,000 km, among the longest of any country relative to its size — because it comprises a mountainous peninsula plus something like 6,000 islands and islets, of which only a couple of hundred are inhabited. Around 80 per cent of the mainland is mountainous, which historically fragmented settlement into the separate city-states that shaped the classical world. Our Greece country guide covers the regions and islands.
Georgia: the country, not the state
Georgia sits in the South Caucasus, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, with an area of about 69,700 km² and roughly 3.7 million people. It is emphatically not the American state of the same name, and the two are unrelated: the country's name in English probably derives from the Persian Gurj, while the US state was named for King George II. Georgians call their country Sakartvelo.
The Greater Caucasus range forms its northern border and contains peaks above 5,000 metres. Georgia is also one of the strongest candidates for the earliest known winemaking, with archaeological evidence of grape wine production going back some 8,000 years, and the Georgian language has its own script, unrelated to Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic. Two regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have been outside the Georgian government's control since the early 1990s and are recognised as independent by a small number of states.
Three in the Americas
Guatemala is the most populous country in Central America at roughly 18 million, with about 109,000 km² of territory, and it has the largest indigenous share of population in the region — a majority in several highland departments, speaking more than twenty Mayan languages. It has volcanoes in the high thirties by count, several of them active, and holds Tikal, one of the greatest Maya cities.
Grenada is a Caribbean island state of about 344 km² and roughly 115,000 people, the smallest G country by a wide margin. It produces a disproportionate share of the world's nutmeg and mace, which is why a nutmeg appears on its flag.
Guyana is the only one of the three on the South American mainland, and the odd one out in every respect: English-speaking, Commonwealth, culturally more Caribbean than South American, and roughly 90 per cent forested with most of its small population on a narrow coastal strip that lies partly below sea level and is protected by seawalls. Large offshore oil discoveries from 2015 onward have made it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
What the G names came from
The letter divides cleanly between names peoples gave themselves and names Europeans applied:
- Endonyms and self-chosen names: Ghana, adopted in 1957 from a medieval empire as an act of historical reclamation. Guatemala, from a Nahuatl name usually glossed as place of many trees.
- Names from outside: Germany, from the Latin Germania — Germans say Deutschland. Greece, from the Latin Graecia — Greeks say Hellas. Georgia, most likely via Persian — Georgians say Sakartvelo. Grenada, from the Spanish city of Granada.
- Colonial-era regional labels retained: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Guyana, all discussed above.
- River names: Gambia and Gabon both take their names from water — the Gambia from its river, Gabon from the Portuguese gabão, a cloak, describing the estuary's shape.
Three of the eleven are therefore known internationally by names their own majority language does not use — a proportion typical of European countries and much lower among the African members, most of which renamed or kept indigenous names at independence.
Greenland is not on the list
Greenland is the largest island on Earth at over 2.1 million km², and it is not a sovereign country. It is a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and control of most domestic affairs, while Denmark retains foreign policy and defence. It left the European Communities in 1985 — the only territory ever to do so before the United Kingdom — and independence is an active political question there rather than a settled one.
A few other G entities also fail the test: Gibraltar is a British overseas territory at the mouth of the Mediterranean; Guadeloupe and French Guiana are French overseas departments; Guam is a US territory; Guernsey is a British Crown dependency. And German East Africa, Gold Coast and Gran Colombia are all former G polities that dissolved into the modern states of Tanzania, Ghana, and Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama respectively.
At eleven members, G is one of the fuller letters — well behind S with around twenty-five and B with seventeen, but far ahead of the thin end of the alphabet, where four letters share two countries between them.