The Meaning Of –stan At The End Of Many Countries Name - Foreign Affairs

The Meaning Of –stan At The End Of Many Countries Name - Foreign Affairs - Nairaland

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The Meaning Of –stan At The End Of Many Countries Name by BizLifeE(op): 2:47am On Jan 11, 2020*

What does the “-stan” at the end of so many country names mean?

"-stan" is Persian and means "land of..".
So it is legitim for some countries like Afghanistan and Tajikistan to end their name with -stan because these countries are majority Persian speaking countries.

Also do the regions of Kurdistan and Lorestan have a legitim claim on the ending -stan because the languages of these regions belong to the Iranian language family.

Other countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan have the -stan ending because in Centralasian middleage lingua franca in these regions was Persian. So many Turkic speaking peoples took this ending but it still wasn't common there. It first became common when Soviet government had created the ASSR Turkestan and splited it later in SSR Kazakhstan, SSR Kyrgyzstan and so on. So the real creator of this common ending for Turkic country names was the USSR.

And the last known one is Pakistan.
Pakistan is just an acronym for [P]unjab, [A]fghania (todays Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), [K]ashmir, [I]ran, [S]indh and Balochis[tan].

These are the major ethnicities of the new created Muslim state on the Indian subcontinent.

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-stan-at-the-end-of-so-many-country-names-mean

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