Crna Gora or Montenegro: the country's name explained

Plenty of people land in Montenegro without realising that hardly anyone there calls it that. In the country, on road signs and in the constitution itself, it’s Crna Gora, and that’s the word you’ll keep seeing. Here’s what it means, how to say it and why the two names don’t contradict each other.

Crna Gora, the black mountain

Crna Gora means ‘black mountain’. Crna is black and gora is mountain, so Montenegro isn’t a different name at all, just the same idea in a Romance-language form. Think of it as a name for home use and its translation for everyone else.

Why black? That part I’m leaving out. You’ll hear a few folk explanations, but none appears on the official sites I’ve consulted, so I won’t present an unverified story as fact. The country’s story that does have sources, from Duklja and Zeta to independence, is in the history of Montenegro.

What the constitution says

The 2007 constitution starts with the local name. Its first article describes Crna Gora as a civic, democratic and ecological state of social justice, and ‘ecological’ isn’t decoration, since 20 September is Ecological State Day, according to the National Tourism Organisation. Article 4 sets out the state symbols, which I explain in the Montenegro flag, and Article 13 covers language and script.

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Latin and Cyrillic, side by side

Article 13 says Cyrillic and Latin script are equal in law. So the name can appear as Crna Gora or as Црна Гора, and it’s not unusual to see both in the same place. In this guide I always use the Latin form, which is the one you’ll find easier to read.

To pronounce it, it helps to know that in the local Latin alphabet c sounds like ts. Crna Gora comes out roughly as ‘tsrna gora’, with the r doing the job of a vowel. The official language is Montenegrin, and Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian and Croatian are also in official use; the detail is in the Montenegro language guide.

Montenegrins

People from Montenegro are Montenegrins in English. In the December 2023 census, 256,436 people declared themselves Montenegrin by nationality, 41.12% of the 623,633 total, and 205,370 declared themselves Serbian. Those are MONSTAT’s census declarations and I give them as they are, without reading anything into them. The full breakdown is in Montenegro’s population.

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The .me at the end of the web address

One practical detail I like to point out. The official websites I rely on for this guide, the government’s, the National Parks’ and the railway’s, all end in .me, as in gov.me, nparkovi.me and zpcg.me. If you’re unsure whether a site is official, the domain is a first clue, though not proof, since many private businesses use it too.

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