A demonym (/ˈdɛmənɪm/; fromAncient Greekδῆμος (dêmos)'people, tribe'andὄνυμα (ónuma)'name') or gentilic (fromLatingentilis'of a clan, or gens')[1] is a word that identifies a group of people (inhabitants, residents, natives) in relation to a particular place.[2] Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place (hamlet, village, town, city, region, province, state, country, and continent).[3] Demonyms are used to designate all people (the general population) of a particular place, regardless of ethnic, linguistic, religious or other cultural differences that may exist within the population of that place. Examples of demonyms include Cochabambino, for someone from the city of Cochabamba; Tunisian for a person from Tunisia; and Swahili, for a person of the Swahili coast.
Many demonyms function both endonymically and exonymically (used by the referents themselves or by outsiders); others function only in one of those ways.
As a sub-field of anthroponymy, the study of demonyms is called demonymy or demonymics.
Since they are referring to territorially defined groups of people, demonyms are semantically different from ethnonyms (names of ethnic groups). In the English language, there are many polysemic words that have several meanings (including demonymic and ethnonymic uses), and therefore a particular use of any such word depends on the context. For example, the word Thai may be used as a demonym, designating any inhabitant of Thailand, while the same word may also be used as an ethnonym, designating members of the Thai people. Conversely, some groups of people may be associated with multiple demonyms. For example, a native of the United Kingdom may be called a British person, a Briton or, informally, a Brit.
Some demonyms may have several meanings. For example, the demonym Macedonians may refer to the population of North Macedonia, or more generally to the entire population of the region of Macedonia, a portion of which is in Greece. In some languages, a demonym may be borrowed from another language as a nickname or descriptive adjective for a group of people: for example, Québécois, Québécoise (female) is commonly used in English for a native of the province or city of Quebec (though Quebecer, Quebecker are also available).
Often, demonyms are the same as the adjectival form of the place, e.g. Egyptian, Japanese, or Greek. However, they are not necessarily the same, as exemplified by Spanish instead of Spaniard or British instead of Briton.[5]
English commonly uses national demonyms such as Brazilian or Algerian, while the usage of local demonyms such as Chicagoan, Okie or Parisian is less common. Many local demonyms are rarely used and many places, especially smaller towns and cities, lack a commonly used and accepted demonym altogether.[6][7][8]
Etymology
National Geographic attributes the term demonym to Merriam-Webster editor Paul Dickson in a work from 1990.[9] The word did not appear for nouns, adjectives, and verbs derived from geographical names in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary nor in prominent style manuals such as the Chicago Manual of Style. It was subsequently popularized in this sense in 1997 by Dickson in his book Labels for Locals.[10] However, in What Do You Call a Person From...? A Dictionary of Resident Names (the first edition of Labels for Locals)[11] Dickson attributed the term to George H. Scheetz, in his Names' Names: A Descriptive and Prescriptive Onymicon (1988),[3] which is apparently where the term first appears. The term may have been fashioned after demonymic, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the name of an Atheniancitizen according to the deme to which the citizen belongs, with its first use traced to 1893.[12][13]
Suffixation
Several linguistic elements are used to create demonyms in the English language. The most common is to add a suffix to the end of the location name, slightly modified in some instances. These may resemble Late Latin, Semitic, Celtic, or Germanic suffixes, such as -(a)n, -ian, -anian, -nian, -in(e), -a(ñ/n)o/a, -e(ñ/n)o/a, -i(ñ/n)o/a, -ite, -(e)r, -(i)sh, -ene, -ensian, -ard, -ese, -nese, -lese, -i(e), -i(ya), -iot, -iote, -k, -asque, -(we)gian, -onian, -vian, -ois(e), or -ais(e).
The Tayabas Tagalog suffix -(h)in, which is mostly used by the natives in the province of Quezon, is also used for their local or native demonyms in English.
Adaptations from the standard Spanish suffix -e(ñ/n)o (sometimes using a final -a instead of -o for a female, following the standard Spanish suffix -e(ñ/n)a)
"-ese" is usually considered proper only as an adjective, or to refer to the entirety.[citation needed] Thus, "a Chinese person" is used rather than "a Chinese".[citation needed] Often used for Italian and East Asian, from the Italian suffix -ese, which is originally from the Latin adjectival ending -ensis, designating origin from a place: thus Hispaniensis (Spanish), Danensis (Danish), etc. The use in demonyms for Francophone locations is motivated by the similar-sounding French suffix -ais(e), which is at least in part a relative (< lat. -ensis or -iscus, or rather both).
Mostly for Middle Eastern and South Asian locales. -i is encountered also in Latinate names for the various people that ancient Romans encountered (e.g. Allemanni, Helvetii). -i.e. is rather used for English places.
It is much rarer to find demonyms created with a prefix. Mostly they are from Africa and the Pacific, and are not generally known or used outside the country concerned. In much of East Africa, a person of a particular ethnic group will be denoted by a prefix. For example, a person of the Luba people would be a Muluba, the plural form Baluba, and the language, Kiluba or Tshiluba. Similar patterns with minor variations in the prefixes exist throughout on a tribal level. And Fijians who are indigenous Fijians are known as Kaiviti (Viti being the Fijian name for Fiji). On a country level:
Demonyms may also not conform to the underlying naming of a particular place, but instead arise out of historical or cultural particularities that become associated with its denizens. In the United States such demonyms frequently become associated with regional pride such as "Burqueño" and the feminine "Burqueña" of Albuquerque,[23] or with the mascots of intercollegiate sports teams of the state university system, take for example the sooner of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Sooners.[24]
Since names of places, regions and countries (toponyms) are morphologically often related to names of ethnic groups (ethnonyms), various ethnonyms may have similar, but not always identical, forms as terms for general population of those places, regions or countries (demonyms).
Literature and science fiction have created a wealth of gentilics that are not directly associated with a cultural group. These will typically be formed using the standard models above. Examples include Martian for hypothetical people of Mars (credited to scientist Percival Lowell), Gondorian for the people of Tolkien's fictional land of Gondor, and Atlantean for Plato's island Atlantis.
Other science fiction examples include Jovian for those of Jupiter or its moons and Venusian for those of Venus. Fictional aliens refer to the inhabitants of Earth as Earthling (from the diminutive-ling, ultimately from Old English-ing meaning "descendant"), as well as Terran, Terrene, Tellurian, Earther, Earthican, Terrestrial, and Solarian (from Sol, the sun).
Fantasy literature which involves other worlds or other lands also has a rich supply of gentilics. Examples include Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, from the islands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag in the satire Gulliver's Travels.
In a few cases, where a linguistic background has been constructed, non-standard gentilics are formed (or the eponyms back-formed). Examples include Tolkien's Rohirrim (from Rohan), the Star Trek franchise's Klingons (with various names for their homeworld), and the Sangheili from the Halo franchise, (also known as Elites in the game by humans, as well as players) named after their homeworld of Sanghelios.
↑ Local usage generally reserves Hawaiian as an ethnonym referring to Native Hawaiians. Hawaii resident is the preferred local form to refer to state residents in general regardless of ethnicity.[14]
Related Research Articles
An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after which or for which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. Adjectives derived from the word eponym include eponymous and eponymic.
English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
Adjectival may refer to:
In Modern English, they is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject.
An endonym /'endənɪm/ is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their place of origin, or their language.
Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British or Commonwealth English date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.
An ethnonym is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms, or endonyms.
In English grammar, a flat adverb, bare adverb, or simple adverb is an adverb that has the same form as the corresponding adjective, so it usually does not end in -ly, e.g. "drive slow", "drive fast", "dress smart", etc. The term includes words that naturally end in -ly in both forms, e.g. "drive friendly". Flat adverbs were once quite common but have been largely replaced by their -ly counterparts. In the 18th century, grammarians believed flat adverbs to be adjectives, and insisted that adverbs needed to end in -ly. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "It's these grammarians we have to thank for ... the sad lack of flat adverbs today". There are now only a few flat adverbs, and some are widely thought of as incorrect. Despite bare adverbs being grammatically correct and widely used by respected authors, they are often stigmatized. There have even been public campaigns against street signs with the traditional text "go slow" and the innovative text "drive friendly."
Anthroponymy is the study of anthroponyms, the proper names of human beings, both individual and collective. Anthroponymy is a branch of onomastics.
People from the United States of America are known as and refer to themselves as Americans. Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States. All forms of English refer to US citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name. In the English context, it came to refer to inhabitants of British America, and then the United States. There is some linguistic ambiguity over this use due to the other senses of the word American, which can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Other languages, including French, Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States, while others, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, primarily use terms derived from United States or North America. There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans. The name America came from the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.
In grammar, an adverbial genitive is a noun declined in the genitive case that functions as an adverb.
Alumni are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums or alumns as gender-neutral alternatives. The word comes from Latin, meaning nurslings, pupils or foster children, derived from alere "to nourish".
↑ Oklahoma, University of (20 May 2013). "What is a Sooner?". University of Oklahoma. Archived from the original on 18 June 2013. Retrieved 26 April 2021.
↑ Prior to the Massachusetts State Legislature designating "Bay Stater" as the state's official demonym, other terms used included Massachusett, borrowed from the native Massachusett tribe, Massachusite, championed by the early English Brahmins, Massachusettsian, by analogy with other state demonyms, and Masshole, originally derogatory.
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