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What is the distinction between homeland, motherland and fatherland?

  1. Is there any difference in meaning of such terms?
  2. When it comes to connotations are there any differences, except for the relation to Russia or Germany?
RegDwigнt
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Piotr Migdal
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3 Answers3

5

The main semantic difference in English is that while all terms refer to one's native land or country of origin, motherland and fatherland also have the connotation of the land of one's ancestors.

Therefore, motherland/fatherland aren't as often applied to countries in the Americas, even if many of us have lived here for a dozen generations or more.

coleopterist
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ghoppe
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4

The term homeland is relatively recent in U.S. English. It debuted in Webster's Eighth Collegiate Dictionary (1973) with the definition, "native land: fatherland." Subsequently, the Ninth Collegiate (1983) added a second definition: "a state or area set aside to be a state for a people of a particular national, cultural, or racial origin." And the Tenth Collegiate (1993), as if to clarify that homeland in the second sense does not apply to the reservation system administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States, added the words "esp : BANTUSTAN" to the second definition.

In contrast, the terms motherland and fatherland have appeared in Webster's dictionaries since the American Dictionary of the English Language of 1847. That dictionary defined motherland as "The land of one's mother or parents," and fatherland as "The native land of one's fathers or ancestors."

The Homeland Security Act, which created the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was enacted quite recently (in 2002). This may help to explain why none of the fairly recent U.S. dictionaries I consulted includes a definition of homeland along the lines of "a core territorial possession, as designated by a national government." However, that meaning seems to be at the heart of homeland as used in connection with U.S. national security; and I wouldn't be surprised to see it emerge as a definition in future dictionaries, considering that the two existing definitions fail to cover that sense of the term adequately.

Sven Yargs
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  • How do you know which edition carried a word first? (I'm not challenging you; I would like to learn how to do that.) – J.R. Mar 01 '13 at 22:35
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    Hi, J.R. A 1970 reprint of Webster's Compendious Dictionary of the English language (1806) contains "a chronology of major dictionaries edited by Noah Webster and Merriam-Webster." The crucial years for the unabridged dictionaries are 1806, 1828, 1840, 1847, 1864, 1890, 1909, 1934, and 1961; and for the Collegiate series, the years are 1898, 1910, 1916, 1931, 1936, 1949, 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993, and 2003. I have copies of all of the Collegiates and all but one of the early bigs (through 1890). To see when a word first appears, I use brute force—checking each dictionary in turn. – Sven Yargs Mar 02 '13 at 01:50
  • The edition I don't have is the 1840 Webster's, which I understand is very similar to the 1847 Merriam-Webster's that I do have. In the case of motherland and fatherland, neither appears in the big 1828 Webster's and I don't know whether it appears in the 1840, so all I can say for sure is that they have been included since 1847. – Sven Yargs Mar 02 '13 at 01:55
  • One further warning: Some of the Collegiates include a "New Words" section in later printings of the same edition, so you have to check them, too, to be completely rigorous; even more problematic are the later Collegiates, which sometimes embed new terms in the main body of the dictionary. Thus the 1993 through 1997 printings of the Tenth Collegiate lack an entry for feng shui, but the 1999 printing of the Tenth Collegiate includes it (making space for the new entry on the affected page of the layout by cutting examples and shortening definitions of other entries). – Sven Yargs Mar 02 '13 at 02:10
  • If you're patient, you can find fairly inexpensive copies of all of the Webster's dictionaries on eBay. Consulting them is a great way to tell when a word became sufficiently popular and proper (in the estimation of the Merriam-Webster lexicographers) to merit inclusion in the book. – Sven Yargs Mar 02 '13 at 02:14
  • It may be a recent edition, but I see an analogy to the older BrE terms home counties for the counties surrounding London and home nations or home countries for the constituents of the U.K. – choster Mar 03 '13 at 05:15
  • @SvenYargs Actually it would be much faster to use binary search instead of checking each dictionary in turn. Actually, I’m pretty sure you already use it to find the word in a given dictionary ;) – kirelagin Feb 21 '16 at 11:22
  • @kirelagin: I would if I could—but I'm working with paper copies of the relevant 20 or so dictionaries, and many of those editions aren't available online. As you can imagine, the brute-force method I use is extremely slow. – Sven Yargs Feb 21 '16 at 11:39
  • @SvenYargs No, that’s not what I mean. Instead of going through them one by one, you first check if the word is present in the middle one. If it is, you go to the older ones and, again, check in the middle one of those older ones, etc. Given that you listed around 20 editions, it is guaranteed that you’ll never have to check more than 5 dictionaries. – kirelagin Feb 21 '16 at 12:18
  • It may not have been in the dictionaries, but "homeland" was used quite a bit starting around 1900. The Ngram stuff is pretty garbled by some bad imaging, etc, but this is a solid hit in 1914, and there are many others. – Hot Licks May 02 '16 at 02:32
  • @HotLicks: Excellent find—and clear proof that U.S. writers were using_homeland_ by 1914 (the author of the book you cite uses it almost a dozen times). I note though, that the book never refers to the United States as a homeland, despite being a history of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Rather, the term is used to designate the land of an immigrant's nativity—as a counterpoint to the person's adopted country, the USA. I didn't check Google Books when I wrote this answer three years ago, because I was chiefly interested in when homeland became common enough in U.S. usage to be included... – Sven Yargs May 02 '16 at 04:29
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    ...in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary series. The Collegiate dictionaries are abridged versions of the corresponding full-size Merriam-Webster New International Dictionaries, with far fewer entries than the latter contain. To achieve that smaller size, they include only words in (then) current, widespread use. For this reason, I think the absence of homeland (or home land) from the Collegiate series until 1973 is a sign of how unimportant Merrriam-Webster considered it until then. I also not that the full-size Webster's New International Dictionary (1926) didn't have it either. – Sven Yargs May 02 '16 at 04:30
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Motherland isn't common in English. Fatherland I would avoid unless you are talking about a specific era of German history.

Homeland is the nearest normal term for your "country of origin" but is a lot less common and doesn't have the added deep meaning that say, "motherland" would in Russia.
As a result of the US airport security I don't think "Homeland" is going to become a popular patriotic term.

mgb
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