How to recognise countries from city names

Place names are built from words in the local language: burg means a fortified town, grad means a city, pur means a town or settlement, bei means north. That is why names cluster geographically — not because anyone planned it, but because the language that produced them did.

The pattern tells you the language family, the language family tells you the region, and the region gets you most of the way to a decent guess. What it cannot do is tell you exactly where a city sits, so treat it as a strong first clue rather than the answer.

• Germanic: -burg, -berg, -dorf, -furt, -stadt, -bach, -hausen — Hamburg, Salzburg, Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Heidelberg. The same endings were carried abroad by German, Dutch and Afrikaans speakers, which is why you find them in Johannesburg or in the American Midwest.
• Slavic: -grad, -gorod, -sk, -ovo, -ice, -ów — Belgrade, Volgograd, Novgorod, Minsk, Gdansk, Smolensk, Katowice, Kraków. -grad and -gorod both mean city, and -sk endings are everywhere from Poland to Russia.
• Nordic: -by, -holm, -köping, -vik, -sund, -fjord — Stockholm, Norrköping, Reykjavík, Sandvik. -by means village or town, -holm an islet, -vik a bay, -sund a strait — names that describe the landscape they sit on.
• Central Asian and Persian: -abad, -stan, -kand, -kent — Islamabad, Ashgabat, Jalalabad, Samarkand, Tashkent. -abad means a settled place; the -kand and -kent endings come from Sogdian and Turkic words for a city or settlement.
• South Asian: -pur, -garh, -nagar, -patnam, -wala — Jaipur, Nagpur, Kanpur, Chandigarh, Ahmednagar, Visakhapatnam, Gujranwala. -pur and -nagar mean town or city, -garh a fort. You will also see them in names that travelled: Singapore is Singapura, the lion city.
• East Asian: Bei / Nan / Dong / Xi, -zhou, -an, -shan, -hai — Beijing (northern capital), Nanjing, Dongguan, Xi'an, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai (on the sea). The prefix tells you a direction, the suffix tells you what kind of place it is.
• Japanese: -shi, -machi, -yama, -kawa, -shima, -hama, -saki — Okayama (hill), Kawasaki (river cape), Hiroshima, Yokohama (beside the beach), Fukuoka. Tokyo and Kyoto literally mean eastern and capital city.
• Romance languages: San / Santa / São / Saint, Ciudad, Puerto, Villa, -ville — San José, Santa Fe, São Paulo, Saint-Étienne, Ciudad Juárez, Puerto Montt, Villahermosa, Louisville. A saint's name with a Spanish or Portuguese prefix is a strong sign you are in Latin America or Iberia.
• British and English: -ton, -ham, -ford, -mouth, -wich, -bury, -chester — Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Portsmouth, Norwich, Canterbury. The -chester, -caster and -cester endings all come from the Latin castra, a Roman fort, which is why they follow Roman roads.
• Arabic and Islamic world: Al-, Abu, Umm, Jebel, Wadi, Ain, Ras — Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, Umm Qasr, Jebel Ali, Wadi Rum, Ras al Khaimah. These are descriptive words rather than endings — mountain, valley, spring, headland — and they appear from Morocco to Iraq.
• Dutch and Afrikaans: -dam, -haven, -fontein, -kraal, -stad — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom, Stellenbosch. A -dam or -fontein in a dry-looking landscape is a very strong hint of southern Africa.

Endings are the easiest pattern, but the whole word carries information. Names that describe water — Rio, Bahr, Nahr, Zambezi style compounds — usually sit on rivers or coasts. Names beginning with Dar (house of) or containing Bahr (sea) cluster in Arabic-speaking Africa. Nova, Nueva and Novo mean new, and they mark places named by colonists.

• Colonial exports — Birmingham, Plymouth, Victoria, Georgetown and Port Louis all exist in more than one hemisphere. A familiar name is a hint about who named it, not about where it is.
• Renamed cities — Istanbul was Constantinople, Mumbai was Bombay, Yangon was Rangoon, Beijing was Peking. Older sources and older maps use the former names, and knowing both makes reading either version easier.
• Transliteration — Ukrainian Kyiv is sometimes written Kiev, and Chinese names may appear as Pinyin (Beijing) or as older romanisations (Peking). Same place, different spelling.
• Names that sound one way but sit elsewhere — Cairo also exists in the United States, and Paris in Texas. If a name feels too obvious, check the map before you commit your pin.

Pick one language family a day and list five cities that use its naming pattern. Then, in the game, play a Cities game scoped to a country or continent where that language is spoken. After a few sessions the pattern stops being something you recall and starts being something you notice.