Comments on: Why is South Africa abbreviated as ZA?

Question: Why is South Africa abbreviated as ZA?

theseampsgoto11 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:30:31 -0800

Why is South Africa abbreviated as ZA?

I just got back from South Africa, where most of the URL's end with .co.za. I've also seen the country abbreviated as ZA. Is there a reason why ZA is used instead of SA? None of the official names for South Africa involve a Z and the domain .sa doesn't seem to be used by any other country, as far as I can tell.

The only answer I got so far was something along the lines of "they ran out of letters by the time they got to the bottom of the world."

By: jschu

jschu — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:38:26 -0800

It's from the Dutch Zuid-Afrikaanse.

By: celkins

celkins — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:43:10 -0800

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.za

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:44:22 -0800

It's from the Dutch Zuid-Afrikaanse.

Which means "South African"; the Dutch for "South Africa" is "Zuid-Afrika."

This raises more questions than it asks, though. Why would the official abbreviation come from the country's name in Dutch?

The Afrikaans for "South Africa" is "Suid-Afrika" so SA would be more logical.

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:46:28 -0800

Aha! Thanks, celkins. Of course! Saudi Arabia had first dibs on ".sa" because "Saudi Arabia" comes before "South Africa" in English.

By: tcv

tcv — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:20:59 -0800

Thanks for this one. I always believed it to be from Zaire.

By: unsliced

unsliced — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:23:14 -0800

@Sidhedevil, the alphabet is irrelevant - what's more important is the ISO country code ... way more information on wikipedia

By: Sidhedevil

Sidhedevil — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:41:38 -0800

You're missing my point here: South Africa is twice as large as Saudi Arabia, so one might think that it would have more of a claim to SA as its code; the only rationale I can see for Saudi Arabia getting dibs is alphabetical.

By: bjrn

bjrn — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:00:12 -0800

This raises more questions than it asks, though. Why would the official abbreviation come from the country's name in Dutch?

Because until 1925 Dutch was the official language of South Africa (along with English, I think). I can imagine a lot of these country abbreviations were decided upon a long time ago.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:35:19 -0800

This raises more questions than it asks, though. Why would the official abbreviation come from the country's name in Dutch?

Because it was founded by the dutch and .sa was given to Saudi Arabia.

By: genghis

genghis — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:56:59 -0800

Forget 'Dutch' for a moment. When the codes were being handed out the first language of (most of) the arseholes in charge of the country was Afrikaans.

So the abbreviation is from the Afrikaans.

Other 2-letter country codes are derived either from a local language or some other non-English too: .aq, .hr, and .is spring to mind, there might be others.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:01:35 -0800

Thanks for this question; I learned something today.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:44:16 -0800

the only rationale I can see for Saudi Arabia getting dibs is alphabetical.

Possibly. When they need a tie-breaker they may have other reasons. For instance, Saudi Arabia's independence dates to 1932, but South Africa's to 1934.

Though the ISO country codes were developed in the 1970s, even before the need for top-level domains, at least some may derive from older codes developed by the Universal Postal Union. The UPU was established in 1874.