How is it determined whether to use ‘ian/an’, ‘er’, ‘ese’, or ‘ite’ as a suffix for the name of a people from a place.
In: Other
The people of that place decide collectively, in a highly unofficial manner. Often it’s just a natural extension of the word that follows grammatically.
When the people in question speak a different first language than the people using the name, it’s different. If the namers speak English, then the name was almost always chosen historically by British conquerers. And frequently, the name given for the people is the same as the name given for their language, e.g. “French,” “Spanish,” “Italian,” etc.
It’s very irregular in English and the reasons can be varied and arbitrary. Sometimes the reason is due to which language the original name of the country came to use from (e.g. the -ese ending from Chinese and Japanese is via Portuguese) and sometimes derogatory uses change the term (e.g. most -stan countries would just drop the -stan so Uzbeki, Kazakh, Afghani) but you would not be able to do that with Pakistan as to do so would be a racial slur.
Languages are a convention – speakers create them by using them. So if enough English-speaking people adopt “Mongolian” as a (external) demonym over say “Mongolien” the former becomes the accepted word. English is somewhat specific in that out of major world languages it doesn’t have a formal regulatory body that would be the authority on standardization so it’s even more flexible than some other languages but in general, all languages depend on the common usage among the speakers.
Latest Answers