Austria is a country in the middle of Europe, southeast of Germany and northwest of Hungary. It is in the European Union. The capital is Vienna. People there speak German. It is a land of mountains (the Alps), music, and old cities — a small European country, not an island and not in the Pacific. Older learner books sometimes print a population a little over eight million from 2014; the count has moved since then, but the picture is the same. The English name comes from Latin Austria, a Latin way of writing an old German name meaning ‘eastern realm.’ That ‘east’ is the same idea as English east. A very old related root later meant ‘south’ in Latin, which is why Australia (the southern land) can look like Austria on the page. The two names took different roads; the two countries are on different sides of the world.