Ethnonym

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An ethnonym (from Ancient Greek ἔθνος (éthnos) 'nation'and ὄνομα (ónoma) 'name') is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms (whose name is created and used by the ethnic group itself).

Contents

For example, the dominant ethnic group of Germany is the Germans. The ethnonym Germans is a Latin-derived exonym used in the English language, but the Germans call themselves Deutsche, an endonym. The German people are identified by a variety of exonyms across Europe, such as Allemands (French), tedeschi (Italian), tyskar (Swedish) and Niemcy (Polish).

As a sub-field of anthroponymy, the study of ethnonyms is called ethnonymy or ethnonymics.

Ethnonyms should not be confused with demonyms, which designate all the people of a geographic territory, regardless of ethnic or linguistic divisions within its population. [1]

Variations

Numerous ethnonyms can apply to the same ethnic or racial group, with various levels of recognition, acceptance and use. The State Library of South Australia contemplated this issue when considering Library of Congress headings for literature pertaining to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Some 20 different ethnonyms were considered as potential Library of Congress headings, but it was recommended that only a fraction of them be employed for the purposes of cataloguing. [2]

Change over time

Ethnonyms can change in character over time; while originally socially acceptable, they may come to be considered offensive, or become ethnic slurs. For instance, the term gypsy has been used to refer to the Romani. Other examples include Vandal, Bushman, Barbarian, and Philistine.

The ethnonyms applied to African Americans have demonstrated a greater evolution; older terms such as colored carried negative connotations and have been replaced by modern-day equivalents such as Black or African American .[ citation needed ] Other ethnonyms such as Negro have a different status. The term was considered acceptable in its use by activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, [3] but other activists took a different perspective. In discussing an address in 1960 by Elijah Muhammad, it was stated "to the Muslims, terms like Negro and colored are labels created by white people to negate the past greatness of the black race". [4]

Four decades later, a similar difference of opinion remains. In 2006, one commentator suggested that the term Negro is outdated or offensive in many quarters; similarly, the word "colored" still appears in the name of the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In such contexts, ethnonyms are susceptible to the phenomenon of the euphemism treadmill. [5]

Morphology and typology

In English, ethnonyms are generally formulated through suffixation; most ethnonyms for toponyms ending in -a are formed by adding -n: Bulgaria, Bulgarian ; Estonia, Estonian . In English, in many cases, the name for the dominant language of a group is identical to their English-language ethnonym; the French speak French, the Germans speak German. This is sometimes erroneously overgeneralized; it may be assumed that people from India speak "Indian", [6] despite there being no language in India which is called by that name.

Generally, any group of people may have numerous ethnonyms, associated with the political affiliation with a state or a province, with geographical landmark, with the language, or another distinct feature. Ethnonym may be a compound word related to origin or usage.

A polito-ethnonym indicates that name originated from the political affiliation, like when the polysemic term Austrians is sometimes used more specifically for native, German speaking inhabitants of Austria, who have their own endonyms.

A topo-ethnonym refers to the ethnonym derived from a toponym (name of a geographical locality, placename), like when the polysemic term Montenegrins, which was originally used for the inhabitants of the geographical area of the Black Mountain (Montenegro), acquired an additional ethnonymic use, designating modern ethnic Montenegrins, who have their own distinct endonyms. Classical geographers frequently used topo-ethnonyms (ethnonyms formed from toponyms) as substitute for ethnonyms in general descriptions, or for unknown endonyms.

Compound terminology is widely used in professional literature to discriminate semantics of the terms.

In onomastic studies, there are several terms that are related to ethnonyms, like the term ethnotoponym, that designates a specific toponym (placename) that is formed from an ethnonym. Many names of regions and countries are ethnotoponyms. [7]

See also

Related Research Articles

Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms, including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of any geographical feature, and full scope of the term also includes proper names of all cosmographical features.

A demonym or gentilic is a word that identifies a group of people in relation to a particular place. Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place. Demonyms are used to designate all people 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.

The suffix -onym is a bound morpheme, that is attached to the end of a root word, thus forming a new compound word that designates a particular class of names. In linguistic terminology, compound words that are formed with suffix -onym are most commonly used as designations for various onomastic classes. Most onomastic terms that are formed with suffix -onym are classical compounds, whose word roots are taken from classical languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Endonym and exonym</span> Name variations of ethnic groups, languages, persons, and places

An endonym 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.

Many places in Central Europe, mostly in the former German Empire and Austria-Hungary but now in non-German-speaking countries, traditionally had names in the German language. Many such names have been used for centuries by the German presence in the area dating back to Ostsiedlung, while some others were simply German transliterations of local names or names invented in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Anthroponymy is the study of anthroponyms, the proper names of human beings, both individual and collective. Anthroponymy is a branch of onomastics.

An English exonym is a name in the English language for a place, or occasionally other terms, which does not follow the local usage. Exonyms and endonyms are features of all languages, and other languages may have their own exonym for English endonyms, for example Llundain is the Welsh exonym for the English endonym "London".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rangi people</span> Ethnic group from Dodoma Region of Tanzania

The Rangi are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group of mixed Bantu and Cushitic heritage in the Dodoma Region of central Tanzania. In 2022, the Rangi population was estimated to number 880,000.

The Alagwa are a Cushitic ethnic group mostly based in the Kondoa District of the Dodoma Region in central Tanzania, an area well known for rock art. Smaller numbers of Alagwa reside in the Hanang district of the Manyara Region in Tanzania, as well. They speak the Alagwa language as a mother tongue, which belongs to the South Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. In 2022, the Alagwa population was estimated to number 52,816 individuals, and Mous (2016) estimates the number of speakers to be slightly over 10,000.

In the English language, the term negro is a term historically used to refer to people of Black African heritage. The term negro means the color black in Spanish and Portuguese, where English took it from. The term can be viewed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the time period and context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.

Names of the Serbs and Serbia are terms and other designations referring to general terminology and nomenclature on the Serbs and Serbia. Throughout history, various endonyms and exonyms have been used in reference to ethnic Serbs and their lands. Basic terms, used in Serbian language, were introduced via classical languages into other languages, including English. The process of interlingual transmission began during the early medieval period, and continued up to the modern times, being finalized in major international languages at the beginning of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Name of Hungary</span> Descriptions of the country of Hungary

Hungary, the name in English for the European country, is an exonym derived from the Medieval Latin Hungaria. The Latin name itself derives from the ethnonyms (H)ungarī, Ungrī, and Ugrī for the steppe people that conquered the land today known as Hungary in the 9th and 10th centuries. Medieval authors denominated the Hungarians as Hungaria, but the Hungarians even contemporarily denominate themselves Magyars and their homeland Magyarország.

Some historical Chinese characters for non-Han peoples were graphically pejorative ethnic slurs, where the racial insult derived not from the Chinese word but from the character used to write it. For instance, written Chinese first transcribed the name Yáo "the Yao people " with the character for yáo猺 "jackal". Most of those terms were replaced in the early 20th-century language reforms; for example, the character for the term yáo was changed, replaced this graphic pejorative meaning "jackal" with another one – a homophone meaning yáo瑤 "precious jade".

The Albanians and their country Albania (Shqipëria) have been identified by many ethnonyms. The native endonym is Shqiptar. The name "Albanians" was used in medieval Greek and Latin documents that gradually entered European languages from which other similar derivative names emerged. Linguists believe that the alb part in the root word originates from an Indo-European term for a type of mountainous topography, meaning "hill, mountain", also present in Alps. Through the root word alban and its rhotacized equivalents arban, albar, and arbar, the term in Albanian became rendered as Arbëreshë for the people and Arbëria for the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Name of Bosnia</span>

The name of Bosnia is commonly used in English language as an exonym Bosnia, representing the South Slavic common endonym Bosna. The name was first recorded during the 10th century, in the Greek form Βόσονα, designating the region. In following centuries, the name was used as a designation for a Bosnian medieval state. After the Ottoman conquest in 1463, the name continued to be used as a designation for the Sanjak and Eyalet of Bosnia. After the Austro-Hungarian occupation in 1878, the region of Bosnia was reorganized and the name of its region of Herzegovina incorporated into the dual name of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Choronym is a linguistic term that designates a proper name of an individual region or a country. The study of regional and country names is known as choronymy, or choronymics. Since choronyms are a subclass of toponyms, choronymic studies represent a distinctive subfield of toponymic studies and belong to the wider field of onomastic studies.

Religionym and confessionym are polysemic terms, and neologisms, that have several distinctive meanings, generally related to religious (confessional) terminology, but are defined and used differently among scholars. As a consequence of a wide variety of uses, specific meanings of those terms can be mutually distinctive, but also overlapping. Some scholars have used one or the other term as designations for a particular onomastic class that encompasses the proper names of religions and cults, while others have used the same terms as names for a particular anthroponymic class, encompassing the proper names that designate religious adherents. In scholarly literature, both terms are sometimes also used in much broader meaning, as designations for all terms that are semantically related to religious (confessional) terminology.

Ethnonymic surnames are surnames or bynames that originate from ethnonyms. They may originate from nicknames based on the descent of a person from a given ethnic group. Other reasons could be that a person came to a particular place from the area with different ethnic prevalence, from owing a property in such area, or had a considerable contact with persons or area of other ethnicity. Also, they may reflect the fact that a given person matched a particular ethnic stereotype.

References

  1. ↑ Roberts 2017, p. 205–220.
  2. ↑ Aboriginal Rountable (1995): LCSH for ATSI People. Archived 2011-03-21 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ King, Martin Luther Jr.; Holloran, Peter; Luker, Ralph E.; Penny A. Russell (1 January 2005). The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959 – December 1960. University of California Press. p. 40. ISBN   978-0-520-24239-5 . Retrieved 29 July 2013.
  4. ↑ Message from the Wilderness of North America. A Journal for MultiMedia History article Archived 2007-12-24 at the Wayback Machine .
  5. ↑ "The game of the name" (PDF). Baltimore Sun. 1994-04-03. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-05-15. Retrieved 2011-01-19.
  6. ↑ Bourne, Jill; Pollard, Andrew (26 September 2002). Teaching and Learning in the Primary School. Taylor & Francis. p. 34. ISBN   978-0-203-42511-4 . Retrieved 29 July 2013.
  7. ↑ Room 1996, p. 39.

Sources

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