13
  • people from China = Chinese
  • people from Japan = Japanese
  • people from Australia = Australian
  • people from Lebanon = Lebanese
  • people from Sweden = Swedish

Are there any rules that govern this? Like people from asian countries all end with an "ese" or something? Or maybe some rules within the name of the country?

choster
  • 43,403
RoboShop
  • 2,260
  • 5
  • 19
  • 16
  • 3
    Good question. There's a pretty comprehensive list of such names on Wikipedia: Demonym, with many more suffixes in addition to the -ese, -n and -ish you observed: there's -ian as in Canadian (rather than Canadan), -er as in New Zealander, -i as in Bangladeshi and Israeli, etc. Let's see if anyone has generated a good set of rules from these examples… – ShreevatsaR Mar 09 '11 at 09:11
  • Country names and demonyms should be capitalised; I have edited your question accordingly – F'x Mar 09 '11 at 09:13
  • 1
    people from Sweden = Swedes is an alternative – Henry Mar 09 '11 at 10:13
  • Swedes is a slightly oddball case. Most Demonyms seem to be the adjective for the relevant country, so you can regard "Swedish" as a shorthand for "the Swedish people". However while you would refer to "Swedish meatballs", you wouldn't ever call them "Swedes meatballs"! All of which isn't terribly relevant to the question, of course. –  Mar 09 '11 at 13:48
  • 4
    I think Swedish is the adjective, whereas Swedes is the demonym. – Zsub Mar 09 '11 at 14:30
  • There's also the Scots-Scottish-Scotch situation. – Chris Cudmore Mar 09 '11 at 15:08
  • Sometimes the historical name for the country is needed. For example, many from Sri Lanka call themselves Celonese; the country was Ceylon before 1972. Similarly, many from Myanmar call themselves Burmese; the country was called Burma. And sometimes the demonym defies a simple explanation. The French-speaking African nation of Burkina Faso call themselves Burkinabè (last syllable pronounced as the English word "bay"). Most French would use the orthography Burkinabé (with an acute accent). – rajah9 Mar 09 '11 at 15:53
  • I will not upvote any answer unless it can satisfactorily explain why the people in every country have demonyms that reflect the name of their country, except the Dutch. – oosterwal Mar 10 '11 at 00:28
  • @oosterwal - because they were dutch (duitsch=German) before there was a Netherlands. – mgb May 31 '11 at 16:36
  • Closely related: Are there any universal rules in appropriating -an, -sh, -es, -ch, for -th? Though that question is marked as a duplicate of yet another related question, it includes a lengthy answer (by me) that identifies many categories of demonyms plus some oddballs that don't fit any category. – Sven Yargs Aug 04 '15 at 17:56

2 Answers2

8

Good question. I tried thinking up some sort of guideline and found that I didn't really know myself, so I found this article which does a fairly decent job at explaining it and some general rules on how to apply them. Though, like all things in English, if you want to know with any precision how to call people from certain countries, you must memorize them.

In summary:

With some exceptions, place names ending with:

  • ea or silent e get -ean, e.g. Chilean
  • a get -n e.g. American
  • a vowel get -an e.g. Malian
  • otherwise use -ian e.g. Iranian

The use of -ese, according to the article, comes from Italian words borrowed into English from the first traders in the far east and South America, who were Italian.

The article goes onto to say -ic and -er come from Latin via Germanic languages, and are appended to the end of countries ending in -land or island. -ic is usually used to denote "having some characteristic of", e.g. Icelandic whereas -er is usually used to denote a person from that place, thus Icelander.

The other Germanic suffix -ish means "belonging to", and is only used for countries in Europe. The article points out that French and Dutch uses this suffix, but it has been "fused with the base to create a new irregular adjective".

Finally -i comes from Arabic (e.g. Pakistani), and also means belonging to. Almost all countries that get this suffix are in the Middle East, Central Asia (to the north) and North Africa and are Islamic. Countries that don't have had a long history of contact with The West before conversion to Islam.

Matt E. Эллен
  • 29,137
Neil
  • 2,722
3

The name of “how people from a given place are called” is demonym. You can find more information, including examples, in the Wikipedia. If you have more specific questions, please feel free to edit your original post!

F'x
  • 38,736