Names for people from a place
Hello, everyone!
It sure has been a January, hasn’t it?
You can pre-order Amplitudes: Tales of Queer and Trans Futurity, edited by Lee Mandelo, where my translation of Aiki Mira’s “A Step into Emptiness” will be published. The table of contents is pretty great, and, as the cover says, they’re tales of joy and survival, so if you want to support queer writers and queer books, or if you just need to read hopeful fiction, I hope you take a look. The book is scheduled to come out on May 27, 2025.
What do you call someone from…?
A few months ago, this video crossed my dash on tumblr, and I saved the link to my newsletter topics running document. In the video, a Chinese woman talks about why English drives her crazy, and she starts with America → American, then Canada → Canadan? NO! Canadian! And a lot of the weirdness can be explained etymologically, but for someone learning the language (whether as an adult or a child), it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So today I’m going to talk about demonyms, which is just a fancy way of saying “names for people from a place.” (But first, go watch the video if you haven’t already.)
I can’t figure if there’s a default way to make a demonym in English. It’s usually the same as or similar to the adjectival form of the country name (compare this list on Wikipedia), but the adjective form of country names also doesn’t have a default form. Rather than go through all 190 or whatever countries in that list, I’ll use the ones mentioned in the video.
America → American; Australia → Australian If I had to pick a default adjective formation, -n would be toward the top of the list. Even a lot of the ones that don’t seem obvious, like Laos → Laotian, are basically “stick an (a)n on the end.” (Spelling is another matter, best left to people who have access to the OED.) The Old English adjective declension has -(a)n in the masculine accusative singular (strong form) and in all the non-nominative cases in all genders (weak form), so there’s precedent.
Canada → Canadian This is a variation on -n, but where does the extra i come from? My hunch is from French Canadien, but I can’t find anything to back that up.
China → Chinese According to etymonline, -ese comes from Old French -eis, which comes from Latin -ensem, meaning ‘belonging to or originating in.’ China isn’t found in English writing until the 1550s, so perhaps the -ese was chosen because of the popularity of Latin at the time. For a time (1711 to the early 20th century), English speakers called Chinese people “Chinamen,” which we now view as derogatory.
Germany → German Interestingly, German in its use to refer to the people who live in this broad area generally north and east of the Rhine doesn’t appear in English until the 1500s. Prior to that, in Middle English, it was referred to by the Old/Middle French-derived word Almain, and before that, they most likely referred to the individual tribes, like the Saxons or Franks, or the Allemanni. Germany comes from Latin Germania, where the Germannen lived, and the modern English words follow the same pattern. (The Germans called themselves diutisc ‘the people,’ which is cognate with Old English þeodisc, from whose root the Anglo-Saxon words þeod and þeoden come. The modern Scandinavian languages (Tyskland) and Italian (Tedesco) use words descended from this root, as does German (Deutschland).)
England → English The Angles spoke Anglish and lived in the Angleland, and over time, through sound and language change, they became the English who spoke English and lived in England. (A further sound change, called pre-nasal raising, turned the /e/ into an /i/, much like people from the southern US pronounce pin and pen as pin.) The suffix -ish meaning ‘pertaining to the country of’ goes back to Proto-Germanic *-iska, and its descendents are still used in all the Germanic languages today. It was probably the default way to form demonyms for many years. (This Germanic suffix was borrowed into French as -esque and Italian and Spanish as -esco!)
Poland → Polish As above, the -ish suffix is added to a Pole (a person who lives in Poland, the land of the Poles), so it’s not strictly speaking derived from Poland minus land plus ish, but from Pole plus ish. But because of how English word derivation works, it’s probably easier to guess that it’s Poland minus land plus ish. Either way, the result is the same.
Thailand → Thai If you assume that you take the -land suffix off and replace it with -ish, which is a reasonable thing to do, you would get Thailish, like the woman in the video says. (Though why -l- is the letter she inserted is an interesting question! Thaiish doesn’t work for me as a word.) The Thai people refer to themselves as chao thai, and there was probably some reason in 1808, when the word entered the English language, to use the local term.
I thought she mentioned Netherlands → Dutch, but that must be from a different video (possibly by someone else) that I didn’t paste into my file. Dutch comes from the same root as Deutsch, and was in fact used to refer to Germany until the 17th century.
When you get into demonyms from cities and states, things can get weird. Yeah, you have your Philadelphians and Washingtonians and Ohioans, but you’ve got New Yorkers and Marylanders and Seattleites and from my home town, Fredericktonians (because historically, it was Frederick Town).
Some languages, like (Mandarin) Chinese, have a much more consistent demonym generation method (put -ren on the end). Other languages, like German, have as inconsistent a method as English (in German’s case, for similar reasons).
I couldn’t find any research on demonyms when I looked on JSTOR; I was hoping to find a statistical analysis of which place names take which endings, but either nobody has done one or it wasn’t published in a JSTOR journal. I’m sure there’s a pattern behind it, but without either existing research or a solid paid month where I can wrangle the data myself…
How does this apply to writing?
When you’re coming up with your place names in your fictional settings, you can use a consistent ending for every place name, or you can have a more magpie approach like English does. The benefit of the former is pretty obvious: It’s easier for you to come up with, and it’s easier for your readers to follow.
If you choose to go the magpie route, come up with plausible reasons why these ones take this ending but those ones take that ending, so it’s not completely random. Do they call the people they encounter by the term they call themselves? Have they been in contact with the people for so long that the demonym stems from a much older version of their language? Did they get the name for the people from another people who speak a different language and borrow it into their own? Have the demonyms changed over time? And so on.
Until next time!
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