Thursday, April 11, 2013

ZA vs. SA

Ever wondered why the South African rand is represented by ZAR instead of SAR and why South African websites have a .co.za extension?

As expected, wikipedia provided me with za answer:
None of the official names for South Africa can be abbreviated to ZA, which is an abbreviation of the Dutch Zuid-Afrika. This is a legacy of when Dutch was an official language in South Africa, before being replaced by Afrikaans, in which the name of the country is Suid-Afrika. Afrikaans joined English and Dutch as an official language of South Africa in 1925 in a synonym-status with Dutch, and in the South African Constitution of 1961 Dutch was removed as an official language altogether and replaced by Afrikaans. In 1983 Dutch lost its synonym-status with Afrikaans. However, the .sa domain is used by Saudi Arabia and ZAR is the ISO 4217 currency code for the South African Rand. The international vehicle code for South Africa has been ZA since 1936.