Åland is not part of Scandinavia
Matt Yglesias clears up a point of some geographical confusion:
Americans often find this a bit confusing but Scandinavia, strictly speaking, only refers to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. If you want to add in Iceland and Finland and miscellaneous extra territories (Åland, Faeroe Islands, Greenland) the word you’re looking for is “Nordic.”
I don’t totally understand why the distinction has been drawn this way—but roughly the point is that Finnish is a very different language from the others and that Iceland is clearly a geographically distinct phenomenon from the rest.
Meanwhile, over at Strange Maps there’s a good post laying out the fine differences separating Moldova from its close neighbors. There’s also some commentary on the somewhat mysterious situation of two nearby semi-autonomous regions, Transnistria and Gagauzia, neither of which I have never heard of before.
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