COUNTRY NAMES IN -STAN

[Q] From Audrey Lawson: “I would like to know what the -stan at the end of Pakistan, Afghanistan etc., means and where it originated.”

[A] It’s an ancient suffix, meaning “place” or “home”, which is known from a number of Indo-European languages, including Persian. It isn’t a native English compounding form — historically, we know it through the names for a number of Asian countries such as the ones you mention, plus others like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

It has been brought into English as the word stan, which I believe has yet to appear in any dictionary. It’s a collective term among diplomats and journalists for the countries north and west of Afghanistan that were once part of the old Soviet Union. An article in the Guardian newspaper on 26 October 2001, for example, quoted a diplomat’s approving opinion of a colleague that he “knows the Stans like the back of his hand”.

The only country name that was created in English (though it might first have been formed in Afrikaans, my sources don’t say) is Bantustan, for one of the homelands set aside for occupation by Black Africans within the Republic of South Africa. That came about in the late 1940s as an unofficial, and usually disparaging, formation on the model of Pakistan, itself a constructed name that was based in part on Baluchistan. Bantustan is now also a general disparaging term for any notionally independent country with discontinuous borders, whose internal affairs are controlled in practice by another country.

The political instability of many stans that has kept them in the news has led to the recent use of -stan to form the names of fictional countries characterised either by their first elements or (since most real stans have Muslim majorities) ones that have strong Islamic associations. Hamastan was created in 2007 for the Gaza Strip area of Israel controlled by Hamas; Londonistan is a disparaging term for the British capital that refers to the high numbers of militant Islamists living there. Such invented names are often used humorously, as in Blogistan, a supposed country populated by online bloggers; Nerdistan, concentrations of high-tech and science-based industries, such as Silicon Valley; and Robert Frank’s invention of Richistan, which became the title of his book in 2007, a state within a state in which only the seriously rich live.

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2008. All rights reserved. Contact the author if you want to reproduce this piece, but first see our advice page, which also has notes about linking. Your comments and corrections are welcome.