More Demonyms.

January 8, 2018 by languagehat 208 Comments

Commenter cliff anderson left a comment on this LH post linking to his own post My Favorite Demonyms, and I liked it so much I’m featuring it here. “Utah – Utahn” is pretty well known, but what about these?

St Kitts & Nevis – Kittitian / Nevesian
Botswana – Motswana
Burundi – Umurundi
Lesotho – Mosotho
Kiribati – i-Kiribati
Vanuatu – Ni-Vanuatu
Tampa – Tampanian
Macao – Macanese

And there’s many more at the link. Oh how I love demonyms!

Comments

George Grady says

January 8, 2018 at 11:35 pm

Some of those seem rather like saying the demonym for someone from Russia is “Russky”.
Jongseong Park says

January 8, 2018 at 11:43 pm

Hong Konger? Singaporeans and Malaysians call people from Hong Kong “Hongkies (spelling variable)”, though this isn’t used in Hong Kong and it might be taken to sound mildly offensive to those not familiar with the term.
Matthew Roth says

January 9, 2018 at 12:12 am

St. John of Damascus is invariably “Damascene.”

“Michigander” is a favorite of mine.

Is there one for people from Massachusetts?
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 12:28 am

Queens? The Bronx?
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 12:30 am

I know there must be some suppletive demonyms, i.e. using a completely different root, but I can’t think of any.
marie-lucie says

January 9, 2018 at 12:31 am

The inhabitants of Halifax, Nova Scotia are called “Haligonians”. (I don’t know about those of other Halifaxes.)
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 12:36 am

How about

Hidrocálido – (of a person) Of or from the Mexican state of Aguascalientes.
Gary says

January 9, 2018 at 12:42 am

Is there one for people from Massachusetts?

I believe other New Englanders call them massholes.
marie-lucie says

January 9, 2018 at 12:46 am

SFR: Hidrocálido – (of a person) Of or from the Mexican state of Aguascalientes.

Oh no!
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 12:58 am

suppletive demonyms…

I just remembered jarocho, from the state of Veracruz.
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 1:04 am

Porteño for Buenos Aires and for Valparaíso.

m.-l., Have you ever heard trifluvien for Trois-Rivières?
Matthew Roth says

January 9, 2018 at 1:49 am

I meant a polite one. I am very familiar with “Masshole”…
DF says

January 9, 2018 at 2:02 am

Massachusettsan apparently (does anyone actually use this?)

In Argentina there is puntano, from San Luis.

From Mexicali, cachanilla (arrowweed, a plant).
Emily says

January 9, 2018 at 2:34 am

The Devonian entry in the linked post reminds me of how, as a paleontology-obsessed five-year-old, I liked “Cambrian tea,” i.e. Cambric.
tangent says

January 9, 2018 at 2:52 am

Hm, I would say “Masshole” is east of Worcester.
Lazar says

January 9, 2018 at 2:58 am

Is there one for people from Massachusetts?

As one of them… I don’t know. In childhood someone told me it was “Massachusettonian”, but I think either they or the person they heard it from had just made it up. In journospeak it’s usually “Bay Stater”.

Massachusettsan apparently (does anyone actually use this?)

I’ve never heard it used. Myself, if I could institute a “proper” demonym, I think I’d go with “Massachusetter”.
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 3:26 am

Singular demonym – Massachusett.

Plural – Massachusetts.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 3:33 am

Suppletive? USA — American.
Stephen C. Carlson says

January 9, 2018 at 3:38 am

I was wondering why the demonym of Tampa isn’t Tampan, until I pronounced it.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 4:07 am

And has anyone mentioned “Indiana — Hoosier”?
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 4:10 am

I wonder if there are any Pole dancing jokes?
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 4:20 am

Inevitably.
j. says

January 9, 2018 at 7:38 am

Cambrian tea

Goes well with pelmeni, i.e. “Permian dumplings”?

(well, the Komi-Udmurt linguistic grouping tends to be called “Permic”, but “Permian” as the corresponding aggregate demonym still comes up sometimes.)

“Mordovia” — “Mordvin” is probably also on the non-trivial side.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 8:52 am

Switzerland — Swiss
Holland/The Netherlands — Dutch
Scotland — Scots(wo)man, Scot
Wales — Welsh
France — French
Norway — Norwegian
? — Czech
Portugal — Portuguese
Malta — Maltese
Spain — Spanish, Spaniard
Catalonia — Catalan

(and many others) are non-trivial as well.
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 10:14 am

New South Welshpeople (more inclusive version of the earlier term New South Welshmen)
David Marjanović says

January 9, 2018 at 10:44 am

“Permian dumplings”

Ooh, awesome. On top of that, Permknödel would rhyme with Germknödel!
John Cowan says

January 9, 2018 at 11:02 am

The seal of the Commonwealth is inscribed “Sigillum Reipublicæ Massachusettensis”, which tells us Massachutensian as the proper Latinish demonym. The others given above are probably distortions of it.

People from Poughkeepsie, NY, are traditionally Dorpians, though this must be as dead as the dodo nowadays.

There is no demonym for Independence, Missouri, which resists even the fallback suffix -ite.
languagehat says

January 9, 2018 at 11:16 am

I nominate Independancers.
Lazar says

January 9, 2018 at 11:33 am

The seal of the Commonwealth is inscribed “Sigillum Reipublicæ Massachusettensis”, which tells us Massachutensian as the proper Latinish demonym. The others given above are probably distortions of it.

Eh, I wouldn’t put too much stock in that. In the kind of hobbyistic neo-Latin that gets used on state seals and college diplomas, they’ll just stick -ensis on anything and call it a day.
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 11:53 am

Independencensian
David Marjanović says

January 9, 2018 at 12:04 pm

which tells us Massachutensian as the proper Latinish demonym.

You accidently a sylble.
marie-lucie says

January 9, 2018 at 1:06 pm

Y: m.-l., Have you ever heard trifluvien for Trois-Rivières?

Heard, no, because I don’t live in a French-speaking area, but I have seen it written and guessed what it meant.

Another French demonym:

In Normandy there is a town called Villedieu-les-poêles ‘Villedieu-the-frying-pans’, so called because it was once famous for its copper utensils, an industry dating back centuries because of the copper mines in the area. So many of the local men were involved in making pans, wielding the hammer all day to shape them, that the town was extremely noisy and a lot of people were going deaf. It is not easy to make a demonym out of the town’s name anyway, so others called the inhabitants les Sourdingues (a derogatory derivative of sourd ‘deaf’).
John Cowan says

January 9, 2018 at 1:13 pm

Oops, yes; Massachusettensian.
Rodger C says

January 9, 2018 at 1:57 pm

les Sourdingues (a derogatory derivative of sourd ‘deaf’)

Is that a borrowed Germanic ending? I mean, Normandy.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 9, 2018 at 2:24 pm

People from Castres are Castrais. Big deal, you will say, but it sounds exactly like castré, meaning castrated. When we first met the husband of our then Director we asked him where he was from. Je suis Castrais, he said, knowing perfectly well what it could be taken to mean.

Straying away from demonyms, but sticking with castration, another Director we had was very competent in Spanish, and went often to Venezuela to give courses. On one occasion he started by telling the students what he was able to teach: Soy capable de …. After starting several sentences like that he wondered why everyone was giggling, and learned a bit too late that although capable in French means much the same as in English, it has a very different meaning in Spanish: able to be castrated.
David Marjanović says

January 9, 2018 at 2:37 pm

Is that a borrowed Germanic ending? I mean, Normandy.

I would guess so, but dingue “silly, crazy” probably plays a role.
John Cowan says

January 9, 2018 at 2:44 pm

On Pole jokes, from Mencken:

In September 1933, at a meeting of the Syndykatu Dziennikarzy Polskich w Ameryce (Society of Polish-American Journalists) at Chicago, Mr. Ernest Lilien read a paper on “The Polish Language and Polish-American Writers”. It was devoted mainly to the sins of the speaker’s fellow-journalists, and was full of amusing stories.

There was the one, for example, about the Polish-American telegraph-editor who received a press dispatch one night (in English, of course) about a storm that had knocked over fifty telegraph-poles, and who translated poles as Polacks, to the consternation of his Polish readers. And there was the one about the other Polish-American editor who, trusting the dictionary too much, translated sewer as szwacska (seamstress, i.e. sew-er).

Mr. Lilien handled these brethren somewhat roughly, but his very exposure of their crimes also revealed their defense. For they have to work at high pressure translating the words and idioms of American English into a quite unrelated and far more formal language, and it is no wonder that they occasionally perpetrate astonishing howlers and deface Polish with fantastic new growths.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 3:02 pm

Being a six-foot Pole, I’m accustomed to the fact that there are things people wouldn’t touch with me.
languagehat says

January 9, 2018 at 3:15 pm

After starting several sentences like that he wondered why everyone was giggling, and learned a bit too late that although capable in French means much the same as in English, it has a very different meaning in Spanish: able to be castrated.

I’m gonna call boludeces on that, because there’s no capable in any of my Spanish dictionaries, and the Real Academia dictionary says “La palabra capable+ no está en el Diccionario.” (The Spanish word, of course, is capaz.)

There was the one, for example, about the Polish-American telegraph-editor who received a press dispatch one night (in English, of course) about a storm that had knocked over fifty telegraph-poles, and who translated poles as Polacks, to the consternation of his Polish readers.

I don’t get it, since “Polacks” is an English word. What was he translating into?
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 3:21 pm

I suppose Polacy, pl. of Polak. The word for ‘seamstress’ is spelt szwaczka, by the way.
John Cowan says

January 9, 2018 at 3:28 pm

Polish; this was in the day when there were many American newspapers not in English. Mencken was simply using Polacks as a neutral synonym for Poles here, to more clearly disambiguate it from poles. Presumably the translated article used Polaków, but Mencken’s anglophone audience wouldn’t understand that.

Update: Piotr: I had thought Polacy was collective and Polacków distributive; here we are dealing with a specific number.

I have pinged my Spanish expert on whether capable is a plausible neologism, but he won’t reply for a while; he’s in Australia.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 3:41 pm

I’m gonna call boludeces on that, because there’s no capable in any of my Spanish dictionaries

And OED has no castratable (or castrable, analogous to separable), simply because we rarely need a word with this meaning; still, it is transparently derived and would be interpreted as ‘capable of being castrated’ by anyone sufficiently familiar with English deroivational morphology. Spanish has capar ‘castrate’ and a productive way of forming deverbal adjectives with the suffix -(a)ble.
ryan says

January 9, 2018 at 3:51 pm

Tapatio for what you might have expected to be Guadalajaran.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 9, 2018 at 4:10 pm

Update: Piotr: I had thought Polacy was collective and Polacków distributive; here we are dealing with a specific number.

Polacy is the nom.pl.; Polaków is the gen.pl., which is the required form of all nouns used after numerals higher than ‘4’. With ‘virile’ nouns (+HUMAN, +MALE), and only with them, there is an alternative pattern, with both the numeral and the noun in the genitive. This is optional with ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4’, and obligatory with numerals above ‘4’. With such a genitive phrase in the subject position, the verb is singular, and has the neuter gender in the past tense.

1. jeden Polak
2. dwaj Polacy ~ dwóch (gen.) Polaków
3. trzej Polacy ~ trzech Polaków
4. czterej Polacy ~ czterech Polaków
5. pięciu (gen.) Polaków
…
50 pięćdziesięciu Polaków
…
100 stu Polaków

Without a numeral, the plural is Polacy.

For other classes of nouns, including non-virile masculines, the pattern is like this (n. okno ‘window’, f. żona ‘wife’, m. pies ‘dog’):

1. jedno okno
2. dwa okna (nom.pl)
3. trzy okna
4. cztery okna
5. pięć okien (gen.pl.)
…
50. pięćdziesiąt okien
…
100. sto okien

1. jedna żona
2. dwie żony (nom.pl.)
3. trzy żony
4. cztery żony
5. pięć żon (gen.pl.)
…
50 pięćdziesiąt żon
…
100 sto żon

1. jeden pies
2. dwa psy (nom.pl.)
3. trzy psy
4. cztery psy
5. pięć psów (gen.pl.)
…
50. pięćdziesiąt psów
…
100 sto psów

The Polish system of genders and subgenders is intricate and still evolving, hence the variation. With complex numerals even native speakers may be at a loss. ‘Twenty-one children’ could be expressed as dwadzieścia jeden dzieci, dwadzieścioro jeden dzieci (with a special “collective” form used for counting children or mixed-gender groups), or even dwadzieścioro jedno dziecko. None of them sounds 100% grammatical; I personally prefer the second variant. Other Slavic languages have semi-independently developed similar morphosyntactic spandrels.
languagehat says

January 9, 2018 at 4:22 pm

And OED has no castratable (or castrable, analogous to separable), simply because we rarely need a word with this meaning; still, it is transparently derived and would be interpreted as ‘capable of being castrated’ by anyone sufficiently familiar with English deroivational morphology. Spanish has capar ‘castrate’ and a productive way of forming deverbal adjectives with the suffix -(a)ble.

Fair point, and I withdraw my cavil!
languagehat says

January 9, 2018 at 4:23 pm

Tampa – Tampanian

I have heard from a Tampa native that Tampanian is “way off” and that Tampa native is the most common form.
arthur says

January 9, 2018 at 5:05 pm

Residents of the Virgin Islands are sometimes known as Virgins, an example of a demonyn that is shorter than the place name, and also an example of . . . something else.
David Eddyshaw says

January 9, 2018 at 5:38 pm

The people of St Helena call themselves Saints.
David Marjanović says

January 9, 2018 at 6:21 pm

With complex numerals even native speakers may be at a loss.

While that doesn’t seem to happen in German, there is some variation in the most complex cases. The Stories from 1001 Nights are conventionally rendered Märchen aus tausendundeiner Nacht, using “thousand-and-one” with feminine “one” and singular “night” (invisible dative). I would never have done that; I’d have put it aus tausendeins Nächten, without “and”, with undeclined “one”* and with plural “nights” (visible dative). Yet other people side with English and use “one thousand” rather than bare “thousand”…

Wikipedia says in Arabic it’s ’alf layla wa-layla, evidently “a thousand night and a night”…

* A special counting form in modern Standard German, strictly distinct there (and perhaps nowhere else) from the strong neuter eines.
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 7:00 pm

In Hebrew, too, a counted noun may occur in some circumstances in the singular (including “A thousand nights and a night”). There is no sharp boundary between which nouns prefer the plural and which prefer the singular.
marie-lucie says

January 9, 2018 at 7:14 pm

Sourdingues: Is that a borrowed Germanic ending? I mean, Normandy. – David: I would guess so, but dingue “silly, crazy” probably plays a role.

It seems to me that there must be other words, but apart from dingue the ones that come to mind are devoid of any negative connotation and do not include the rhyming suffix (e.g. la meringue, la seringue ‘syringe’), In any case, sourdingue is not limited to Normandy.

People from Castres are Castrais. Big deal, you will say, but it sounds exactly like castré, meaning castrated.

I do not pronounce these words the same, as I have an old-fashioned pronunciation which differentiates the relevant vowels at the end of words. There would be no problem with a woman saying she is from Castres: je suis Castraise.

Local people would pronounce the masculine words the same, because there is no such vowel difference in an area where the local French has an Occitan substrate. (My maternal grandparents were from a village not far from Castres, where they also had relatives).

In any case the name of the city (or smallish town) is from a form of Latin castrum ‘military camp’ (as in English Chester).
David Eddyshaw says

January 9, 2018 at 7:25 pm

Re the Thousand and One Nights:

Tritton’s old “Teach Yourself [Classical] Arabic” says (IIRC) “the numerals are the nightmare of a bankrupt financier.”

“One” is an adjective, and agrees in gender and case with its singular noun.
“Two” is a dual, and agrees in gender, number and case with the noun; it’s only used for emphasis, as there’s a perfectly good dual number already.
3-10 are singulars, disagree in gender with the noun, which is in the genitive plural (except with broken plurals, of course, which appear as genitive singular, with the gender of the number opposite to whatever the gender of the singular is; it doesn’t matter what the broken plural’s gender is. Why would it?)
11-19 are followed by the noun in the accusative singular. They disagree in gender with the noun.
The tens (including “twenty”) are formally plural. They too take an accusative singular noun. In compound numbers, units come before tens, and the counted noun is still in the accusative singular.
After hundreds and thousands the noun is in the genitive singular. In compound numerals, hundreds and thousands usually precede lower numerals. The case and number of the noun depend on the numeral just preceding it.
However, the plurals “hundreds” and “thousands” are themselves followed by the genitive plural.
Oh, and “200”, “2000” are themselves duals, of course. But that goes without saying.
I’ve not gone into the position of the article. It’s pretty intuitive …
Lazar says

January 9, 2018 at 8:49 pm

On the topic of castro – Slavoj Žižek, when discussing Cuba, has put forth the amazing argument that the glorification of privation and decay as parts of the revolutionary struggle is encapsulated in the very name of Fidel Castro: “fidelity to castration”.
languagehat says

January 9, 2018 at 9:19 pm

For Žižek, that’s not especially amazing — I’d call it one of the six impossible analyses he performs before breakfast as a warm-up exercise.
Michael Hendry says

January 9, 2018 at 9:42 pm

I drive through Rockingham County twice a week – that’s in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and surrounds the city of Harrisonburg. When I see the sign, I often wonder whether locals would be Rockinghamsters, and that always reminds me of one of the earliest joke websites, Dancing Hampsters (sic), still to be seen here. Low-grade humor helps me stay awake on my 300-mile roundtrips. Perhaps I shouldn’t apologize: it’s a better joke than Žižek’s.
Y says

January 9, 2018 at 10:48 pm

The rules in Hebrew for whether the enumerated noun is expressed in the singular or plural, and whether the numeral is in the absolute or construct case, are even messier than the Classical Arabic rules you mention. They depend on the noun, on the number, on semantic subtleties (collective plural or not), and on the register. In biblical Hebrew the order of noun and numerals can be reversed, too.
SFReader says

January 9, 2018 at 11:02 pm

from a form of Latin castrum ‘military camp’ (as in English Chester).

Žižek would say that privation and decay is encapsulated in the very name of Manchester city: “Man castrated”
John Cowan says

January 9, 2018 at 11:24 pm

pięćdziesięciu Polaków

So that’s what we have here: fifty telegraph Poles knocked down.
Graham Asher says

January 10, 2018 at 12:48 pm

Castrer doesn’t seem to exist in French, and there’s a better alternative, châtrer (I remembered that word from a gruesome TV series about mediaeval France called Les Rois Maudits). The dictionary (Dictionnaire de Français Littré) says:

Le mot castrer n’a pu être trouvé dans l’index.

castreur

nm (ka-streur)

Châtreur.

A. M…. castreur est un de ceux qui ont été à la recherche de B…. après son crime. [Gazette des tribunaux]

REMARQUE

Il est inutile de forger le latinisme castreur quand on a châtreur.
marie-lucie says

January 10, 2018 at 6:15 pm

Graham: I checked in the TLFI in which there is a verb castrer but no such word as castreur in Standard French. But such forms are attested in some dialects which did not change Latin ca into cha or che. Castreur is attested in an official document from 1416. Like the verb, the noun may have been a deliberate Latinate borrowing used in scientific contexts, like la castration.

Another ca borrowing is le castrat, from Italian castrato, a term used in the context of musical history for castrated male opera singers, who were in demand in Europe for some time before the 19th century.

There is a town in France called La Châtre, which does not refer to the operation (châtrer) or its performer (le châtreur) but is from Latin castra (the plural of the neuter singular castrum) reanalyzed as a feminine singular word.
marie-lucie says

January 10, 2018 at 6:19 pm

Villedieu-les-poêles

Update: Wikipédia.fr says that the town is still a centre for manufacturing high quality cooking utensils, and that its inhabitants are les Sourdins, which sounds much better than Sourdingues.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 11, 2018 at 4:08 am

I’m gonna call boludeces on that, because there’s no capable in any of my Spanish dictionaries, and the Real Academia dictionary says “La palabra capable+ no está en el Diccionario.” (The Spanish word, of course, is capaz.)

Piotr has already said everything I was planning to say, so I won’t repeat it.

I have a Venezuelan colleague, and was also planning to ask her if she found the story believable, but I haven’t yet.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 11, 2018 at 4:12 am

Tritton’s old “Teach Yourself [Classical] Arabic” says (IIRC) “the numerals are the nightmare of a bankrupt financier.”

All that makes the Russian treatment of numerals seem transparently simple.
abxjd says

January 11, 2018 at 7:00 am

If anyone has been watching the French mini-series ‘Glacé’ (aka ‘The Frozen Dead’), which is set in the south of France, you may have noticed that that verb they use for ‘castrate’ is emasculer. It crops up disturbingly often (in the show).
AJP Tailor & Cutter says

January 11, 2018 at 8:13 am

My favourite is Nuyorican, a New Yorker with a Puerto-Rican background, and Loisaida, the Puerto Rican name for the Lower East Side. I first heard Nuyorican in 1976-ish, in connection with the Nuyorican Poets Café when my ex-wife had a (painting) studio down at the Henry Street Settlement, and the word apparently only dates to the sixties, when it was used as a slur.

How hard it is for my fingers to remember HTML tags when I don’t use them (the tags) every day.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 11, 2018 at 8:57 am

If anyone has been watching the French mini-series ‘Glacé’ (aka ‘The Frozen Dead’),

I need to give it a try: we used to watch M6 a lot when our daughter was little, but pretty much never now.
marie-lucie says

January 11, 2018 at 8:57 am

abxjd: … the French mini-series ‘Glacé’ (aka ‘The Frozen Dead’), … that verb they use for ‘castrate’ is emasculer. It crops up disturbingly often (in the show).

Are they using émasculer about animals or men? Perhaps châtrer is too concrete, too close to the barn, and émasculer sounds more scientific.
John Cowan says

January 11, 2018 at 11:18 am

Because of the disruptions resulting from renaming streets (addresses have to be changed, etc.), in recent years New York has given streets secondary names. 6th Avenue was formally renamed to Avenue of the Americas in 1945, but New Yorkers have never accepted this name, and while it remains official, both names appear on street signs. But since then, such secondary names as “Fashion Avenue” for the part of 7th Avenue in the garment district have become common. In particular, Avenue C is dual-signed throughout its length as “Loisaida Avenue”.
Lazar says

January 11, 2018 at 12:06 pm

Regarding Puerto Rico, there’s also the informal demonym boricua deriving from the Taino name for the island, Borinquen. Likewise Quisqueya and quisqueyano for Dominicans.
abxjd says

January 11, 2018 at 12:13 pm

Are they using émasculer about animals or men? Perhaps châtrer is too concrete, too close to the barn, and émasculer sounds more scientific.

This could well be it – the speakers are mostly detectives and forensic scientists. The victims are human…
Alex M. says

January 11, 2018 at 1:03 pm

The lovely people of Barbados are known as Bajans [‘beɪdʒən].
Emily says

January 11, 2018 at 1:59 pm

There was the one, for example, about the Polish-American telegraph-editor who received a press dispatch one night (in English, of course) about a storm that had knocked over fifty telegraph-poles, and who translated poles as Polacks, to the consternation of his Polish readers.

I am reminded of a joke that’s apparently been told about several presidents:
“Mr. President, yesterday two Brazilian soldiers were killed.”
“Oh no! How many is a Brazilian?”
Y says

January 11, 2018 at 2:56 pm

Now, how did [x] become [tʃ] as mejicano became chicano?
Lazar says

January 11, 2018 at 4:05 pm

@Y: I think chicano is an adaptation of the indigenous pronunciation. In Náhuatl, the names of the old Mexica people and of Mexico use [ʃ]; Spanish still had this sound, represented by x, at the time of conquest, but later it shifted to [x].* [ʃ] is now extremely marginal in most varieties of Spanish,** only kept as a sort of cultured xenophoneme, and in popular speech foreign [ʃ] is often rendered as [tʃ] instead.

*México, mexicano, Oaxaca, etc. were exempted from the orthographic shift x > j in modern Spanish, and from what I’ve heard, the alternative spellings with j are seen as somewhat colonialistic in Mexico today.

**Excepting progressive Rioplatense varieties that use [ʃ] for y/ll, and some in Andalusia and the Caribbean which use it as a lenited form of ch.
Y says

January 11, 2018 at 4:22 pm

Thanks! Does anyone say [meʃiko] as an intentionally authenticizing pronunciation?
Lazar says

January 11, 2018 at 4:33 pm

Hmm, that I don’t know. Maybe among native speakers of Náhuatl and/or people favoring an indigenous flavor of nationalism, but that’s just pure speculation on my part.
Brett says

January 11, 2018 at 5:03 pm

I knew somebody from Mexico when I was in college, who did use that pronunciation. I don’t remember where she was from in the country, but it didn’t sound to me like an intentional affectation (but who knows).
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 11, 2018 at 6:38 pm

The default Mexican realisation of of /x/ is either a “plain” (non-retracted) velar [x] (thus normally in Mexico City) or glottal [h] (in many regional accents). In either case it may be palatalised by a following /i/, making México sound like [ˈmeçiko] (as in this recording). It’s very different from the normative European Spanish pronunciation, which is retracted even when adjacent to front vowels. I think this [ç] is sufficiently similar to [ʃ] to be occasionally mistaken for it by foreign listeners.
David Marjanović says

January 11, 2018 at 7:27 pm

[ç] is systematically replaced by [ʃ] (and thus /ʃ/) in the second-generation-immigrant sociolect of Berlin.

More or less the same thing has happened in various Rhineland accents. Such people tend to hypercorrect /ʃ/ to [ç] when they try to speak with a less specifically regional accent; Kohl did it, Schulz is doing it.
Y says

January 11, 2018 at 8:27 pm

Piotr, David: Even if Anglophone speakers of Spanish mistook [ç] for [ʃ], they would not pronounce [ʃ] as [tʃ].
Jongseong Park says

January 12, 2018 at 3:41 am

The lovely people of Barbados are known as Bajans [‘beɪdʒən].

Bajan is to Barbados as Cajun is to Acadia in terms of derivation.
ajay says

January 12, 2018 at 7:21 am

Some of those seem rather like saying the demonym for someone from Russia is “Russky”.

Well, yes and no – a Russian speaking English wouldn’t say “I am a Russky”, but a person from Botswana would call themselves a Motswana.

How “Glasgow” goes to “Glaswegian” has always puzzled me. Norwegian is presumably an anglicised version of Fr Norvegien. But there isn’t a French toponym for Glasgow (Glasvege?) that I know of.
ajay says

January 12, 2018 at 7:23 am

Falkland Islands – Kelpers.

I wonder what the smallest society is that still has its own demonym? There are only 50 Pitkerners (Pitcairn Islanders) … that’ll be hard to beat.
Rodger C says

January 12, 2018 at 9:38 am

Maybe among native speakers of Náhuatl and/or people favoring an indigenous flavor of nationalism

Well, then they’d be saying [me’ʃiʔko].
marie-lucie says

January 12, 2018 at 9:44 am

a jay: there isn’t a French toponym for Glasgow (Glasvege?) that I know of.

Indeed there is not.
John Cowan says

January 12, 2018 at 4:06 pm

Athel Cornish-Bowden says there are only four places in the British Isles (obviously excluding the Channel Islands) with unique French names: Londres, Douvres, Cornouailles, and Cantorbéry. The last, I conjecture, because of the massive Huguenot immigration there.
David Marjanović says

January 12, 2018 at 9:42 pm

Cornouailles

If you include that, you’ll also have to include Pays de Galles, Écosse, Irlande and Angleterre…
Eilean Donan, AJP says

January 12, 2018 at 9:55 pm

No one called themselves ‘Phoenician’ in Phoenician, not least because phoenix is a Greek word — for palm tree
Jongseong Park says

January 12, 2018 at 10:35 pm

Athel Cornish-Bowden says there are only four places in the British Isles (obviously excluding the Channel Islands) with unique French names: Londres, Douvres, Cornouailles, and Cantorbéry.

What is it meant by “unique French names”? If we’re merely going for exonyms in French, then we also have Édimbourg.
John Cowan says

January 12, 2018 at 10:41 pm

Well, of course the names of countries do not count, but Cornwall is a separate country only in the dreams of the Corns.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 7:03 am

The Thames → La Tamise
East Anglia → L’Est-Anglie
Beachy Head → cap Béveziers

As per Wikipedia, there are also some obsolete French exonyms for a few cities in England:

Buckingham → Bouquinquant
Glasgow → Glasgovie
Newcastle upon Tyne → Neufchâtel-sur-Tyne
Portsmouth → Porsemue
Westminster → Ouestmoutiers
Winchester → Vicêtre/Bicêtre (via Old French Vinchestre)

(plus some miscellaneous traditional names of counties/regions/islands)
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 7:51 am

Piotr, apart from La Tamise, I wonder whether those “obsolete French exonyms” were ever in common use. I remember reading Bouquinquant for the Duke of Buckingham, a well-known person in the 17C. At the time, people ignorant of English would try to read the names as if they were French and adjust the spelling to something pronounceable by French speakers. Another one I remember is Vital for Whitehall. I assumed that those were the writer’s own attempts.
David Marjanović says

January 13, 2018 at 8:26 am

Le Kremlin-Bicêtre is “next to” Paris (i.e. pretty deep inside it except officially).
David Eddyshaw says

January 13, 2018 at 8:46 am

The Phoenicians called themselves “Canaanites.” Naturally.
minus273 says

January 13, 2018 at 9:24 am

The thing itself is worth a little bit pondering. That Italian-, Dutch- or German-language placenames are referred to in a traditional French equivalent is as unremarkable as how the Chinese and the Japanese treat each other’s proper names. This, however, does not seem to apply to Britain. Why?
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 11:51 am

We have “nativised” Polish names for about a dozen French cities/towns (including Paryż, Marsylia, Tuluza, Hawr, Wersal), most of the provinces and some of the larger rivers (Sekwana, Rodan, Loara). Important German toponyms, from Aachen to Zittau (I mean from Akwizgran to Żytawa), are rather thoroughly assimilated.

As for British cities, however, only three have long-established Polish exonyms (Londyn, Edynburg, Oksford). The Thames is Tamiza. Among the countries/regions of the United Kingdom, Szkocja, Walia, Irlandia Północna, Kornwalia are always Polonised (as are Szetlandy, Orkady, Hebrydy). Somewhat paradoxically, the English spelling of York, UK, is used in Poland, but New York City is Nowy Jork.

The older Polish diaspora in Glasgow used to treat its name af it it had a Slavic suffix, and they declined it accordingly (w Glazgowie, z Glazgowa ‘in/from G.’). They may have brought this usage from pre-war Poland. In Polish books and newspapers from the 19th c. Glasgow was usually spelt à la polonaise: Glazgów. I don’t know how modern Glaswegian Poles treat it colloquially, but the local Polish media don’t decline it.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 13, 2018 at 12:07 pm

Athel Cornish-Bowden says there are only four places in the British Isles (obviously excluding the Channel Islands) with unique French names: Londres, Douvres, Cornouailles, and Cantorbéry. The last, I conjecture, because of the massive Huguenot immigration there.

I hope I said “England” rather than “the British Isles”, because I usually try to avoid saying one when I mean the other.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 13, 2018 at 12:16 pm

We have “nativised” Polish names for about a dozen French cities/towns (including Paryż, Marsylia, Tuluza, Hawr, Wersal)

I suppose Hawr is Le Havre, but I’m surprised it’s well known enough in Poland to rate an exonym of its own. What about Lyon, Lille and Bordeaux?

Somewhat paradoxically, the English spelling of York, UK, is used in Poland, but New York City is Nowy Jork.

Spanish is quite happy with Nueva York, but in Portuguese it’s Nova Iorque. They’re more consistent than the Poles, however, as the English city is Iorque, if Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre is to be trusted.
minus273 says

January 13, 2018 at 12:26 pm

from Akwizgran to Żytawa

Wow. Excellent examples of the foreign part of Germany, whose existence is learnt from Latin-language books, and the not-really-foreign part of Germany, where an authentic Slavic name is available.

Speaking of exonyms, I love modern Mongolian for being the only major, living language that preserves old Sogdian exonyms like Enetkheg for India.
languagehat says

January 13, 2018 at 12:40 pm

And now I love it too!
Lazar says

January 13, 2018 at 1:03 pm

@ACB: From what I gather, Spanish has more tolerance for k in loanwords whereas Portuguese more aggressively changes it to c or qu (e.g. Pakistán and Pekín vs. Paquistão and Pequim) – and also has a greater penchant for epenthesis (Irak vs. Iraque).
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 1:19 pm

What about Lyon, Lille and Bordeaux?

They are spelt the French way today (though the adjective derived from Bordeaux is bordoski, as in wino bordoskie, and we have the colour term bordo ‘claret’). Cultural relations between Poland and France (as well as Italy) have been quite close since the Renaissance.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 1:23 pm

I hope I said “England” rather than “the British Isles”, because I usually try to avoid saying one when I mean the other.

Dammit, I said “a few cities in England”, and then listed Glasgow among them. Tha mi duilich!
John Cowan says

January 13, 2018 at 1:34 pm

I hope I said “England” rather than “the British Isles”, because I usually try to avoid saying one when I mean the other.

You did, and you only referred to your own knowledge:

What I find interesting is how many placenames have no s in their original language but acquire one when translated — not just [Lyons and Marseilles], but Brussels (Brussel in Dutch, but Bruxelles in French), Algiers, Naples, Athens, Tangiers, once upon a time Portingals, not to mention (in French) Gênes, Londres, Douvres and Cornouailles. Those last three account for 75% of all the English placenames that I know of that are different in French (the exception being Cantorbéry.)

I shoulda looked it up er sumpn.
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 5:27 pm

David M: Le Kremlin-Bicêtre is “next to” Paris (i.e. pretty deep inside it except officially).

Such double names are those of Métro stations which are in between two streets or next to a landmark.

Like many large cities, Paris has grown considerably from humble beginnings, encompassing more and more of the adjacent villages. It started as a very small Gaulish village on an island in the Seine river, which used a smaller island close by as a pasture for its cows. Later it expanded on the riverbanks, and the new community built a wall around itself, with the islands in the middle. As time went on and the city grew in every direction, from time to time the old walls were torn down and new surrounding walls were erected , so that on a current map of Paris you can see a pattern of concentric streets where the walls used to be. Many buildings and other landmarks which were originally outside of Paris find themselves closer to the centre as the boundaries have been pushed out farther and farther.
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 5:41 pm

Piotr: We have “nativised” Polish names for about a dozen French cities/towns … and some of the larger rivers (Sekwana, Rodan, Loara).

Sekwana is not nativized from French (la) Seine, but from its Latinized Celtic ancestor Sequana. Similarly Rodan is from Greco-Latin Rhodanus, not of modern (le) Rhône. Only Loara is nativized from French (la) Loire.

Important German toponyms, from Aachen to Zittau (I mean from Akwizgran to Żytawa), are rather thoroughly assimilated.

I suppose that Aachen and Akwiz… are from Latin “Aquas” (referring to local mineral waters), as is the initial part of French Aix in the equivalent name Aix-la-Chapelle and a few others, but what is …-gran ?
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 5:56 pm

ACB: I suppose [Polish] Hawr is Le Havre, but I’m surprised it’s well known enough in Poland to rate an exonym of its own. What about Lyon, Lille and Bordeaux?

What about international trade? A ship from Poland (or Northern Germany) can sail around or through Denmark and reach England and France without going all the way to the Atlantic. Le Havre, as its Scandinavian-based name indicates, has been an important harbour for centuries, not only for ships coming from Northeastern Europe but also, being close to the mouth of the Seine, a gateway to enter France and go at least as far as Paris (as barges still do). Bordeaux is also an important port, also on a long estuary, but it is quite far from the Northern shipping routes and it is unlikely that Polish ships would have regularly gone that far. As for Lyon and even Lille, they are located inland. Lyon is on the Rhône, also an important river but not easy to navigate, unlike the placid Seine.
languagehat says

January 13, 2018 at 6:25 pm

but what is …-gran ?

The Roman name was Aquae Granni.
David Marjanović says

January 13, 2018 at 6:48 pm

Wow. Excellent examples of the foreign part of Germany, whose existence is learnt from Latin-language books, and the not-really-foreign part of Germany, where an authentic Slavic name is available.

Is that one authentic, though? German /ts/ and Slavic /ʒ/ aren’t supposed to correspond.

Taking exonyms straight from Latin, though, is something Polish has done a lot. Hiszpania for starters.

Such double names are those of Métro stations which are in between two streets or next to a landmark.

Sorry, yes, brainfart from sleep deprivation. It’s indeed such a station that lies between the “towns” of Le Kremlin and Bicêtre.

Many buildings and other landmarks which were originally outside of Paris find themselves closer to the centre as the boundaries have been pushed out farther and farther.

Yes, but the trick is that the modern border of Paris is still where the toll wall was in the 19th century. There’s solid urban area far beyond that, but this banlieue proche doesn’t belong to Paris officially.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 6:58 pm

It’s complicated. The oldest Latin name of Aachen was Aquae Grannī ‘waters of Grannus’ (the Celtic god of spas). It was later reshaped into Aquisgrana or Aquisgranum (de-ablatival, with a good deal of folk-etymological distortion), hence Italian Aquisgrana, Spanish Aquisgrán, etc. I think French Aix(-la-Chapelle) reflects Aquis; German Aachen comes from Aquae via OHG Ahha. It shows the operation of the High German consonant shift (unlike Dutch and Low German Aken). The local name (in the Aachen dialect) is Oche.

Mediaeval and Renaissance maps usually gave the “international” Latin names of important towns and rivers. Our largest river, the Wisła, is the Vistula, Vistule, Vistola etc. in the languages of the West (except German). It is Βιστούλας in Modern Greek, reflecting a post-Classical pronunciation of Latin (versus Ptolemy’s Ουιστούλα). Symmetrically, we have Sekwana and Rodan, likewise mediated by School Latin.
minus273 says

January 13, 2018 at 7:00 pm

Is that one authentic, though? German /ts/ and Slavic /ʒ/ aren’t supposed to correspond.

“Zittau (Oberlausitzer Mundart: Sitte, tschech. Žitava, poln. Żytawa, sorb. Žitawa, von slawisch für Roggen)”, saith Wikipedia. “Rye” is žito and žyto in the two Sorbians and żyto in Polish. The Latin Sitavia corresponds to the local German. How did the local s- become the schriftsprachlich ts- is a separate mystery.
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 7:00 pm

David M: such a station that lies between the “towns” of Le Kremlin and Bicêtre.

In many cases the towns have grown so close that in a single street, one side is in one town and the other side in another. The boundaries of Paris may be visible on a map, but not necessarily on the ground.
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 7:03 pm

Aquae Granni

Of course Aquae is only the nominative plural (homophonous with the genitive singular), so Aquas may be closer to what ordinary speakers used for most plurals.

Granni: must be a name, of a person or place?
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 7:06 pm

Sorry, Piotr, I did not see your post when I started mine.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 7:09 pm

Is that one authentic, though? German /ts/ and Slavic /ʒ/ aren’t supposed to correspond.

It’s Sitte in the local German dialect (the “Äberlausitzer Sproche”), Žitawa in Upper Sorbian, and Žitava in Czech. It has a Slavic etymology.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 7:11 pm

Gee, we are posting almost simultaneously. Fortunately, we aren’t contradicting one another.
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 7:21 pm

Piotr: going on: I think French Aix(-la-Chapelle) reflects Aquis.

Ablative plural?

There are at least two more French towns or cities named Aix: Aix-en Provence (not far from Marseille) and Aix-les-Bains, the latter doubly named for its mineral waters and resulting spa.

Occitan for ‘water’ is aiga (official spelling, = [ajgo] in most dialects) , hence the Frenchified name Aigues-Mortes ‘dead waters’ for a town that was among salt marshes.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 7:24 pm

The name of Zittau was recorded as Sitavia, Zittavia, Syttauia, Sittaw in the 13th c., as Sithow, Sytow, Zyttavia, Sittow, Zittaw in the 14th c., Sittaw, Zitte, Sitta in the 15th c., etc. The variation is old, whatever caused it.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 7:51 pm

Ablative plural?

That’s what I think; what else could the Aquis part be? But of course in order to endorse or falsify this guess, the earliest documented forms should be examined carefully. I suppose someone has done so already.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 13, 2018 at 8:17 pm

I see the resort was called officially Aquis or Villa Aquis in the 760s (about the time Charlemagne became King of the Franks), so it was simply “at the waters” (the locative use of the Latin ablative).
marie-lucie says

January 13, 2018 at 8:28 pm

so it was simply “at the waters” (the locative use of the Latin ablative).

That’s what I thought. Merci!
Gary says

January 13, 2018 at 9:27 pm

How did the local s- become the schriftsprachlich ts- is a separate mystery.

There is no voiceless initial S in standard German. If you insist on a voiceless initial sibilant, TS is the closest sound to S in standard German. For example, when I lived in Germany as a small child, I wore Tsveeter and Pullofer (i.e. Sweaters and Pull-overs; Pullofer had the accent on the O).
Bathrobe says

January 13, 2018 at 10:55 pm

Neufchâtel-sur-Tyne — love it. And of course, the demonym Novocastrian comes from a similar process.

But where does ‘Mancunian’ come from?

For Filipinos, there is the demonym ‘pinoy’. This is formed by taking the last four letters of Filipino and adding the diminutive suffix -y in Tagalog. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Apparently a Pinoy with mix of foreign ancestry is called Tisoy, a shortened word for Mestizo.
SFReader says

January 13, 2018 at 11:05 pm

Mamucium, also known as Mancunium, is a former Roman fort in the Castlefield area of Manchester in North West England.
Bathrobe says

January 13, 2018 at 11:06 pm

Interestingly, a gathering of Newcastles from around the world was held in 2012 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It included people from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Newcastle (Canada), Newcastle (South Africa), Newcastle (Australia), Neuburg an der Donau (Germany), Jaunpils (Latvia), Neuchatel (Switzerland), Nove Hrady (Czechia), Akhaltsikhe (Georgia), Shinshiro (Japan), and Kota Bharu (Malaysia).
SFReader says

January 13, 2018 at 11:18 pm

Nove Hrady

That’s cheating. How about inviting Novgorod, Novogrodek and Novograd-Volynsky then…

And Naples too
John Cowan says

January 14, 2018 at 12:00 am

There is no voiceless initial S in standard German.

In most of Germany, yes. In Austria and Switzerland and southern Germany, there is no voiced sibilant at all, even when pronouncing the standard language.
Y says

January 14, 2018 at 12:04 am

Pinoy is an ethnonym, not a demonym. If you are a Philippine expat or child of such, you count as Pinoy, but if you’re a White person who lives in the Philippines, you’re not. If you are from London but have established yourself elsewhere, you’re arguably not a Londoner anymore.
marie-lucie says

January 14, 2018 at 12:29 am

But the “elsewhere” people will always think of you as a Londoner.
Ксёнѕ Фаўст says

January 14, 2018 at 6:35 am

‘Twenty-one children’ could be expressed as…

One could come up with even more ways, e.g. dwudziestka i jedno dziecko or dwudziestka jedynka dzieci. Personally I’m quite fond of the nominalized numerals.
AntC says

January 14, 2018 at 8:10 am

@ajay How “Glasgow” goes to “Glaswegian” has always puzzled me. Norwegian is presumably an anglicised version of Fr Norvegien.

Hmm. I don’t see why/how French would be involved: the Angels and Norse would bring the words direct wouldn’t they?

Glaswegian “extracted from Galwegian”, which is from Medieval Latin for Galloway + -an.

Norwegian similarly via Medieval Latin from “Old English Norweg, Norþweg, from Old Norse Norvegr (“north way”), Norðvegr, from norðr (“north”) + vegr (“way”)”

sources: wiktionary.com and dictionary.com
David Marjanović says

January 14, 2018 at 8:21 am

The local name (in the Aachen dialect) is Oche.

And the (apparently moribund) dialect’s endonym is Öcher Platt.

There is no voiceless initial S in […] [northern and central] German. If you insist on a voiceless initial sibilant, TS is the closest sound to S in [northern] German.

I was wondering about that, but I’m pretty sure Upper Lusatia is far enough north to have automatic initial [z]. The Wikipedia article on the dialect contains a few surprises (retroflex approximant /r/, dative -e preserved at least sometimes, nu ~ no for “yes” like in colloquial Polish…), but doesn’t mention this issue, and the audio files are all just single words that happen not to contain /s/ at all.
David Marjanović says

January 14, 2018 at 8:39 am

nu ~ no for “yes” like in colloquial Polish…

I should actually elaborate on that. The Polish version is no, not nu, and I suppose it’s cognate with the Russian one that means “but”. (“Well” > “well, yeah” vs. “well” > “well, actually”.) Nu may well be a German-internal development; nu meaning “now” (Standard nun) is scattered all over the place. So perhaps nu and no have different origins but have been equated in this dialect…
SFReader says

January 14, 2018 at 8:53 am

Is Czech ano related?
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 14, 2018 at 8:55 am

The use of nu for ‘well, right; so what?, what’s up?; I say’ (or anything like that) is part of the linguistic stereotype of a Polish Jew. Not only Polish, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuV1yfj2NNM
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 14, 2018 at 9:01 am

We use ano for (approximately) ‘oh, well’. Polish ano tak means ‘ah, yeah, that’s right’. Thanks to the popularity of Czech films, most Poles are familiar with the Czech meaning of this interjection.

[Edited to add:] Etymologically it’s a + no; the latter must be a slightly irregular development of Proto-Slavic *nъ (the same that yields the Russ. ‘but’ word) — ultimately identical with the short-vowel variant of the PIE adverb *nu ‘now’, cf. Slavic *nyně ~ *nъně ‘now’.
Y says

January 14, 2018 at 2:34 pm

I’d call nu a marker of exasperation or impatience. Hence Yinglish nu already (Hebrew nu kvar) and other collocations.
John Cowan says

January 14, 2018 at 4:44 pm

There are also Scowegians, a branch of the Scandihoovian people. As in:

“Come on, fool porterfull, hosiered women blown monk sewer? Scuse us, chorley guy! You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty angglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! ‘Tis a Jute. Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks.” —FW 16:8-9

The first sentence may be a little tough for anglophones: it’s “Comment vous portez-vous aujourd’hui, mon blond monsieur?”, a sentence that recurs in different forms (sometimes “dark” rather than “blond”) throughout FW. Modern commentary says that oach and eather are parodies of strong-verb ablaut.
Garrigus Carraig (long away) says

January 15, 2018 at 12:37 pm

It has always seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that Spanish is particularly serious about its gentilicios. On Spanish Wikipedia, where I found most of these, you can find them in the infobox for a town.

Elche • ilicitano
Madrid • madrileño
Huelva • onubense
Nueva York • neoyorquino
Valladolid • vallisoletano
Ciudad de México • mexiqueño
Estado de México • mexiquense
Benecid • benezurrino
Cádiz • gaditano
Alcalá de Henares • complutense
languagehat says

January 15, 2018 at 12:56 pm

It certainly is (I have a book of them), and welcome back!
marie-lucie says

January 15, 2018 at 2:08 pm

French demonyms tend to follow the same principles as the Spanish ones: as far as possible, use a Latinate form, as in Eburovicien for the people of Evreux. Some of these are from actual Latin(ized) forms found in ancient documents (official documents were required to be in French starting from the 16C), others (like Québécois Trifluvien) are more recent creations. So Spanish onubense reflects the old name Onuba (stressed on O) of present-day Huelva.

In Alcalá de Henares • complutense, the first word looks Arabic, but where does complutense come from? I have seen it before, in the name of a university.
Rodger C says

January 15, 2018 at 2:39 pm

The Latin name of Alcalá de Henares is Complutum.
Lazar says

January 15, 2018 at 2:57 pm

@Garrigus Carraig: Despite the impressive triplet mexicano/mexiquense/mexiqueño, in practice I think defeño and capitolino are more common in the third case. There’s also chilango, which according to some only refers to people who’ve moved to the capital, although many others seem to use it without qualification.
John Cowan says

January 15, 2018 at 3:37 pm

The Complutensian University moved from Alcalá de Henares to Madrid in 1836, but did not reclaim its name of Universidad Complutense (now qualified by de Madrid) until the 1970s. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible was printed there in 1517, making it the first printed polyglot edition of the whole Bible. The Old Testament was printed in the Hebrew text, the Vulgate, and the LXX (the Pentateuch also included the Aramaic Targum Onkelos and a Latin translation of it) in parallel columns. The New Testament presented the Vulgate and the LXX, also in parallel columns.

As for Alcalá de Henares ‘the citadel on [the river] Henares’, the first part is indeed Arabic. Henares means ‘hay fields’, which once lay on both banks.
languagehat says

January 15, 2018 at 3:40 pm

There’s also chilango, which according to some only refers to people who’ve moved to the capital

First I’ve heard of that refinement. My Larousse diccionario usual says “Nativo de la Ciudad de México” (emphasis added).
Lazar says

January 15, 2018 at 5:24 pm

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the distinction made in practice, but you’ll see it when you look for folk definitions. For example, on the Urban Dictionary page for chilango somebody says –

Persona que vive en la ciudad de México, pero que viene de provincia.
El error mas común es decir que es una persona que nació en el DF, a esta persona se le llama “Defeño”
languagehat says

January 15, 2018 at 5:39 pm

Interesting; I wonder how that developed? Maybe newcomers were proud of their new self-definition and went around proclaiming they were chilango, and old-timers were put off by it.
Marja Erwin says

January 15, 2018 at 7:18 pm

“That’s cheating. How about inviting Novgorod, Novogrodek and Novograd-Volynsky then… And Naples too”

And Nijmegen and Cartagena.
juha says

January 15, 2018 at 10:56 pm

And Nijmegen and Cartagena.

And Nystad/Uusikaupunki and (Duna)újváros.
Hans says

January 15, 2018 at 11:59 pm

No, Nove Hrady ain’t cheating. In contrast to Russian gorod “city, town”, Czech hrad means “castle”.
SFReader says

January 16, 2018 at 12:08 am

Back in 10th century when Novgorod was founded, the word meant “fortified place” in Old Russian too.
Piotr Gąsiorowski says

January 16, 2018 at 2:01 am

And a smaller fort, if new, was a Navahrudak (Навагрудак), Novogrudok (Новогрудок), Naugardukas, Nowogródek, Novhardok (נאָווהאַרדאָק‎) — with a diminutive suffix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navahrudak
Y says

January 16, 2018 at 2:58 am

There was in the 1700s a Cherokee town called Gatu’gitse’yi, near the present-day Franklin, NC; it’s parsed [gaːduhǝ̃ːʔj – atseːhi], settlement-new. (I didn’t mark tones.)
Hans says

January 17, 2018 at 2:04 pm

Back in 10th century when Novgorod was founded, the word meant “fortified place” in Old Russian too.
Yes, but that doesn’t make Nove Hrady cheating. And it would be a sufficient reason to admit place called “New Town / New City” to the “Newcastles” club only if the “town / city” word meant “castle” at the time the place was founded.
Denis says

January 17, 2018 at 3:27 pm

Concerning demonyms, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, exists the commune of Lagrâce-Dieu, the gentilé is Gracieux-divins.

Other communes :

Oô : Onésiens

Marignac : Marignacais
Marignac-Lasclares : Mariclarains
Marignac-Laspeyres: Maripeyrains

Frequently, communes with the same name : Portet, Montgaillard, Trébons …have lightly different demonyms.
languagehat says

January 17, 2018 at 3:48 pm

Gracieux-divins is wonderful!
Y says

January 17, 2018 at 4:00 pm

Gracieux-divins reminds me of LDS members referring to themselves as “Saints”.
Bill Boyd says

January 18, 2018 at 6:56 pm

More:

Costa Rica: Tico
Guatemala: Chapín
Honduras: Catracha
El Salvador: Guanaco, Chero
Nicaragua: Pinolero
marie-lucie says

January 18, 2018 at 11:30 pm

Most of these must be from local indigenous languages.
Y says

January 19, 2018 at 1:14 am

Tico: From the diminutive suffix -tico in Costa Rica, elsewhere -tito. (Spanish Wikipedia).

Chapín: Folks in Guatemala City wore footwear similar to what was called chapines in Spanish. The RAE says it’s an onomatopoeia (like flip-flop, I suppose). (Spanish Wikipedia).

Catracho: From Gen. Florencio Xatruch (of Catalan ancestry), who led Hondurans and Savadorans in a successful battle against William Walker’s army. (Spanish and English Wikipedia).

Guanaco: Central American for ‘stupid’ is all I could find. How the Peruvian animal name got there I can’t tell.

Chero: Salvadoran and Honduran for ‘buddy’. Perhaps from French cher. Or cf. some Peninsular dialectal cherer for querer.

Pinolero: Eater of pinole (itself from Nahuatl).

Also, paisa (from paisano) means ‘Colombian’ in Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela; ‘Nicaraguan’ in Costa Rica; and ‘Chinese immigrant’ in various parts of Latin America.
Lazar says

January 19, 2018 at 2:30 am

From the diminutive suffix -tico in Costa Rica, elsewhere -tito.

-tico occurs in some other countries too, although Wiktionary says it can be derogatory. So I guess Costa Ricans either distinguish themselves by using it the most, or by using it positively.

Also, paisa (from paisano) means ‘Colombian’ in Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela;

But within Colombia, it means someone from a particular region in the northwest. So apparently it’s kinda like Yankee.
Trond Engen says

January 19, 2018 at 3:58 am

A friend of mine who spent a year in Costa Rica as an exchange student back in the eighties, told me about ths. He said they used nico for “Nicaraguan”, but I also think he said Nicaraguans didn’t like it. Or maybe it was the Panamans who didn’t like theirs, which I don’t remember,

Y: Also, paisa (from paisano) means ‘Colombian’ in Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela; ‘Nicaraguan’ in Costa Rica; and ‘Chinese immigrant’ in various parts of Latin America.

Lazar: But within Colombia, it means someone from a particular region in the northwest. So apparently it’s kinda like Yankee.

So (in Col.) “inhabitant of a particular northwestern region” -> (in the immediate vicinity of Col.) “Colombian” -> (elsewhere) “Chinese immigrant”. Did the (first?) Chinese immigrants to Latin America arrive through Colombian ports?

OTOH, I think the meanings of paisa could have been derived independently. In the Bolivarian countries it means “countryman”, hence one from the main country, In Colombia it means “peasant”, hence someone from somewhere rural, and elsewhere it means means someone laboring on the fields, hence “Chinese immigrant”.
Bill Boyd says

January 19, 2018 at 7:36 am

And three from Bolivia (where we spent a couple of years back in the early ’90s):

“Cambas”: those from the Santa Cruz de la Sierra area (generally the eastern part of the country)

“Collas”: those from the western part, although for some users of the term refers to those from the altiplano, specifically their “first nations people” (e.g., Quechuas, Aimara).

“Chapacos”: those from Tarija, in the south near the border with Argentina.

P.S. A restaurant we frequent in southern Alexandria (VA) is run by a family from El Salvador and I’ve a friendly relationship with “Alex” who, by the way, makes a great tamal. Next time, I’ll ask him who refers to him as “guanaco” and “chero” and how he feels about such a nickname.
E says

January 19, 2018 at 6:21 pm

For all you experts on demonyms: how, exactly, does one go about choosing one when there isn’t, as far as can be determined, a “proper” one? I translated a book from Lithuanian which used the demonym “Vilnietis” for someone from the city of Vilnius. I went with “Vilniutian” mostly because of the analogy of the “s” ending to Mars/Martian, which happened to rather suit the mood of the text. (Incidentally, the second “i” in Vilnius merely indicates a soft “n.”) Now I’ve come across it again. Anyone have a better suggestion?
Y says

January 19, 2018 at 6:57 pm

Vilniusian, like Venusian?
languagehat says

January 19, 2018 at 7:19 pm

someone from the city of Vilnius.

Huh, that’s a tough one, and I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to wonder. The problem, of course, is the Lithuanian -ius ending; the old form Vilna had Vilnan (from A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World: “a ‘Roman’ Vilnan might be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, and a ‘Greek’ Vilnan—Uniate or Orthodox”; this is in a passage that calls the city Wilno, for what that’s worth), and I’d be tempted to use that except I guess nobody would understand it. But I sure hate both “Vilniutian” and “Vilniusian.” (In Russian it’s виленец, plural виленцы.)
minus273 says

January 19, 2018 at 7:45 pm

Vilnius declines rather like a Latin u-stem noun. If we say manualis and cornualis, why not Vilniuan? There is of course also the possibility to take the Lithuanian gentilic and tackle a Latin ending to make it familiar-looking: Vilnetian.
E says

January 19, 2018 at 7:46 pm

I’m assuming something like the Botswana/Motswana is something that actually comes from the local language, since English doesn’t have that sort of method of forming them. Perhaps the best thing would be to just go with “Vilnietis?”

Yes, there are many historical names for Vilnius, just like there were once many religions…
languagehat says

January 19, 2018 at 7:50 pm

Perhaps the best thing would be to just go with “Vilnietis?”

Surely you jest. 1) How would an English-speaker pronounce it? 2) What would the plural be?
languagehat says

January 19, 2018 at 7:51 pm

Actually, now I’m thinking Vilnian would be ideal.
David Eddyshaw says

January 19, 2018 at 7:54 pm

Vilniac.
marie-lucie says

January 19, 2018 at 8:00 pm

the Botswana/Motswana is something that actually comes from the local language

Yes, Tswana is one of the Bantu languages, which divide nouns into several classes indicated by prefixes such as bo- and mo-.
marie-lucie says

January 19, 2018 at 8:32 pm

the Botswana/Motswana is something that actually comes from the local language

Yes, Tswana is one of the Bantu languages, which divide nouns into several classes indicated by prefixes such as bo- and mo-. Similarly for Burundi – Umurundi and Lesotho – Mosotho.
marie-lucie says

January 19, 2018 at 8:34 pm

JC: “Comment vous portez-vous aujourd’hui, mon blond monsieur?”, a sentence that recurs in different forms (sometimes “dark” rather than “blond”) throughout FW.

This is another pun! “Mon bon monsieur” ‘My good sir’ is old-fashioned but is found very frequently in literature, with a connotation that the monsieur in question is not as clever as he thinks. For instance, in the fable of the fox and the raven, the fox having first addressed the raven as Monsieur du Corbeau (which suggests that the raven is from the nobility), later switches to Mon bon monsieur to emphasize that his flattering words were only intended to dupe the raven (and succeeded).

French speakers would be very unlikely to say Mon blond monsieur, or use a similar descriptive phrase as a term of address.
John Cowan says

January 20, 2018 at 3:37 am

Venusian

Venerean (as opposed to venereal, just as Martian is opposed to martial).

mon blond monsieur

I didn’t mean that it’s a repeated French sentence, but rather a sentence whose equivalent in many languages appears throughout the book. Thus a hundred pages later it shows up as “kak, pfooi, bosh, and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen?” which is Russian Kak vy pozhivaete, moy chërny gospodin? ‘How are you today, my dark sir?’ I think ‘my blond sir’ and ‘my dark sir’ are pretty much equally unnatural in all languages, certainly in English.
SFReader says

January 20, 2018 at 4:25 am

Dark Lord? Tolkien reference?
marie-lucie says

January 20, 2018 at 7:52 am

JC: mon blond monsieur

Thanks for the explanation.
Athel Cornish-Bowden says

January 20, 2018 at 9:07 am

In the past Spanish people (especially men) were called coños in Chile, and it wasn’t regarded as especially offensive or vulgar, but referred to the idea that Spanish men were unable to utter a sentence that didn’t include the word coño. I think it’s largely disappeared however, as people have become more conscious of what coño means in other Spanish-speaking countries. My wife says that she doesn’t think anyone of her generation or younger would say it, but the previous generation did.
marie-lucie says

January 20, 2018 at 10:32 am

In the past Spanish people (especially men) were called coños in Chile, …. it referred to the idea that Spanish men were unable to utter a sentence that didn’t include the word coño.

Similarly, during the 100 Year War the English were called godons (“Goddamns”), and after the Vikings conquered Normandy they were called bigots (“byGods”) (something that was discussed in an earlier thread).
MMcM says

January 20, 2018 at 12:24 pm

Motif: How are you today, my dark/fair sir?
languagehat says

January 20, 2018 at 12:31 pm

A very useful site!
Rodger C says

January 20, 2018 at 1:16 pm

I was once told about a crowd in Valparaiso that greeted a visiting Spanish soccer team at the dock with a big banner saying BIENVENIDOS A LOS COÑOS. It wasn’t pretty when the team disembarked.

Vilniotes? 🙂
David Marjanović says

January 20, 2018 at 3:13 pm

It wasn’t pretty when the team disembarked.

This being soccer, that was intentional.
John Cowan says

January 20, 2018 at 3:17 pm

SFReader: no. James Joyce and Tolkien were contemporaries, but there is no indication that either read the other. We are dealing here with two of the major characters of Finnegans Wake, Shem and Shaun, who are contrasting brothers who sometimes perform a sort of vaudeville act. Shem is dark-haired, Shaun blond, and so “How are you today, my blond sir?” is Shem speaking, whereas “How are you today, my dark sir?” is Shaun’s remark.

MMcM: Thanks as always for the full details.
Eduardo Gutentag says

January 23, 2018 at 2:38 pm

From Argentina (well, porteño, really, but perhaps also used in other parts of the country):

Córdoba: cordobés
Catamarca: catamarqueño
Buenos Aires (the province): bonaerense
Buenos Aires (the city, as already noted): porteño
La Plata: platense
Santiago: santiagueño (IIRC applied only to those from Santiago del Estero, not from Santiago de Chile)
Entre Rios (the province): entrerriense (pace Wikipedia, which lists entrerriano, which I never encountered while growing up there)
Santa Fé: santafesino
David Marjanović says

January 23, 2018 at 6:40 pm

Entre Rios (the province):

Sometimes equated with Mesopotamia in zoological nomenclature.
Hans says

January 24, 2018 at 7:36 am

Entre Rios (the province): entrerriense (pace Wikipedia, which lists entrerriano, which I never encountered while growing up there)
Borges uses entrerriano in “La otra muerte” (in the middle of the first paragraph), so it’s at least attested.
SFReader says

January 24, 2018 at 9:12 am

Sometimes equated with Mesopotamia

Mawarannahr
languagehat says

January 24, 2018 at 9:47 am

For those perplexed by SFReader’s meow/growl: “Transoxiana (also spelled Transoxania), known in Arabic sources as Mā warāʼ an-Nahr (Arabic: ما وراء النهر‎ Arabic pronunciation: [ˈmaː waˈraːʔ anˈnahr] – ‘what [is] beyond the [Oxus] river’).”
SFReader says

January 24, 2018 at 10:26 am

I note that warāʼ in Mawarannahr is cognate of word ‘Hebrew’ (comes from from ʻibrī – one from the other side [of river])
gwenllian says

January 24, 2018 at 12:58 pm

I’d call nu a marker of exasperation or impatience. Hence Yinglish nu already (Hebrew nu kvar) and other collocations.

That’s how it’s used in Serbocroatian. Also for “look!” or “would you look at that”. I don’t really hear it used for “but”, “however” or “than” the way no is, only see it writen with that meaning in old works, but I’m sure it still happens in some dialects.
Eduardo Gutentag says

January 26, 2018 at 8:14 pm

@Hans: either my dialect somehow became contaminated by Brazilian Portugues, or I read too much geology as a teenager. See https://books.google.com/books?id=Eq1W6eoUa_cC&pg=PA330&lpg=PA330&dq=entrerriense&source=bl&ots=FF6j7rcuPV&sig=Rd1ANq3npvA6c0Y8_0zZm6ACiVA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwji_PuF6vbYAhWh7IMKHR1SDAU4ChDoAQhFMAg#v=onepage&q=entrerriense&f=false, p 330, “[…] (c) a coastal environment facies (Entre Rios or “Entrerriense Formation”, and passim.
Both possibilites are equally improbable…so how it got into my dialect will remain a mystery for me. I can live with that.
Hans says

January 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm

@Eduardo: I wasn’t trying to say that your variant doesn’t exist, only to show that the other one does exist in the wild. 🙂
Y says

February 1, 2018 at 4:51 pm

Just learned Capetonian, the demonym for Capetown.
Lazar says

February 1, 2018 at 4:58 pm

*Cape Town. If I remember correctly, the Anglophones made a point of fixing the spelling with a space to make it look classier. Myself, though, I’d prefer Capetown to pair with Kaapstad.
ktschwarz says

August 16, 2018 at 5:01 pm

Interesting demonyms that I learned on vacation in France:

City of Auray in Brittany: Alréen, presumably from the Breton name, An Alre.

Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: germanopratin, using Latin pratum = French pré. If I understand fr.wikipedia correctly, this was coined in the 1950’s and seems to be more an intellectual/artistic circle than a demonym.
marie-lucie says

August 16, 2018 at 5:25 pm

ktschwarz: Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: germanopratin, using Latin pratum = French pré. If I understand fr.wikipedia correctly, this was coined in the 1950’s and seems to be more an intellectual/artistic circle than a demonym.

I agree. I remember encountering this word in reading (I forget what) but I don’t think I have ever heard it said.

This area of Paris is named after a church originally built among meadows. As in many older areas of Paris, there are deep underground layers of older buildings which ended up as cellars. During the German occupation, some of those cellars were deep enough that any noises there could not be heard from the street, so they became nightclubs which could defy the curfews and stay open all night. Some of them became even more popular after the liberation, when people no longer needed to hide their nocturnal activities. But then the attraction of defying the occupant was gone.
ktschwarz says

August 21, 2018 at 7:21 pm

@marie-lucie, thanks for the background! The pseudo-Latin germanopratin feels to me like something deliberately made up as a joke by someone (most likely Boris Vian), but if so, Wikipedia doesn’t know about it.
marie-lucie says

August 21, 2018 at 9:07 pm

Glad to be of service, kt. The district is where Sartre and his entourage hung out, among many others. The cafés and some caves (underground cellars) are still there, the latter especially attracting foreign and provincial tourists.

defying the occupant

Oops, I think I should have used occupier or occupying forces. The French wordl’occupant means both occupier and occupant.
John Cowan says

October 23, 2019 at 4:02 pm

An American immigration official is interviewing a Russian who just got off the plane. At first, all is well: “Name?” … “Address?” … “Place of birth?” …

But then things go off the rails with “Occupation?” The Russian replies “Oh no! Only tourist!”
Roberto Batisti says

October 24, 2019 at 8:05 pm

One prominent example of suppletive demonym is, of course, Italian “Germania — tedesco”.

As regards the use of Latinate forms, Italian seems to be on the same page as its sisters French and Spanish; compare e.g. “Ivrea (Lat. Eporedium) — eporediese”, “Gubbio (Lat. Iguvium) — iguvino”.
In other occasions these forms exist as learned and/or humorous synonyms of the regular, transparently derived demonym, e.g. an inhabitant of Bologna is a bolognese but there exist the (suppletive!) forms ‘felsineo’ (from Latinized Etruscan Felsina) and ‘petroniano’ (from the patron St. Petronius), and similarly for some other towns. These byforms are for some reason especially beloved of sports journalists.
David Marjanović says

October 24, 2019 at 8:18 pm

In German, sports journalists are absolutely desperate for synonyms, and so they love to refer to everyone they write about by the demonym of their otherwise completely unknown home village.

But those hardly get more irregular than Zürich > Zürcher (not a typo).
Cliff A says

December 2, 2024 at 12:34 pm

Thanks for linking. Love the comments here, as well as your blog in general.
languagehat says

December 2, 2024 at 12:43 pm

Thanks for commenting, so I could discover your post Los Mejores – Spanish Mascots for MLB Team — I only got two of the Difficult set. I thought my Spanish was better than that, but I guess it’s lost its edge in the last half-century or so.
Jerry Friedman says

December 2, 2024 at 1:19 pm

I actually knew what “Potras” were but didn’t connect it with a baseball team till several minutes later, with a groan. Also, astro is in fact a Spanish word for “star”.
David Eddyshaw says

December 2, 2024 at 1:30 pm

Burkina Faso and Burkinabé. (Basically made up by Thomas Sankara, but the accepted term, nevertheless.)

“Nigerien” has a certain something.
Y says

December 2, 2024 at 2:12 pm

“Oregano”, jokey for Oregonian.
David Marjanović says

December 2, 2024 at 3:28 pm

Burkinabé

Burkinabè, as a middle finger to French orthography (indeed phonology of Young People Today).

More Demonyms.

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