A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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exonym
An exonym is the name outsiders use for a place, a people, or a language, in their own tongue rather than in the local one. Germany, Finland, Japan, and Greece are all exonyms; the people living in each of those countries call it something else. Exonyms arise from trade, conquest, translation, and simple mishearing, and they often preserve the name of whichever neighboring group the outsiders met first.
Etymology
The word is Greek for outside name and was coined in the twentieth century as a counterpart to endonym, when geographers needed a vocabulary for the problem of what to print on a map.
Notes
Germany collects more exonyms than almost any country, being Deutschland at home, Allemagne in French, Niemcy in Polish, Saksa in Finnish, and Vokietija in Lithuanian, each one recording a different tribe or a different first impression. Formal name changes on maps are usually a country asking the world to switch from an exonym to its endonym.